Help for Putty.

[Belinda Dermody]

I have putty working on my PC NT. I also have SSH working on L3000 box. I did the puttygen and created rsa keys and saved them in a home directory/.ssh It does not look like other private keys (it includes the public key plus they are separate lines not continuous like SSH private keys). I run pageant.exe and point it to the id_rsa keys. I put the public keys on the L3000 in the .ssh directory authorization file (which has a line key authorized_keys). But I am still being prompted for the user passwd when I putty to the L3000 box. I do have all the permissions set right (I have SSH running on multiple HP and SUN systems). So my main question is the private keys for id_rsa in the correct format. I did not use a passphrase as I am wanting to use pageant.

[RAC_1]

SSH will work based on three authetications.

1. hosts based. (where you set .shosts and /etc/shosts.equiv files)
2. password interactive. (passwords required for logins)
3. Exchange of public/private keys.

You can also specify preferred authetication method in sshd_config file. Check this and set your method accordingly.

[Steven E. Protter]

I'm attaching a doc on the subject.

I've never tried key exchange between an NT/XP in my case box and ptty. I use ptty and want password challenges so my five year old can't get on my Linux Server as root user.

The user id you use must be the same for the public key thing to work.

I have created an admin user named root for myself, should I ever choose to exchange public keys.

SEP

[Belinda Dermody]

Not to sound petty. I have SSH working on 5 HP systems and 30 Sun platforms inside a firewall and outside a firewall and without anyproblems no password prompting. My problem is with PUTTY to the HP system, I am always being prompted for a password going from my PC to the HP system. my concern is the id_rsa file on the PC it is not formatted or look like the same id_rsa file that would be generated on a HP system.

I have attached the file and I deleted and replaced characters so I wouldn't compromise myself.

[Belinda Dermody]

Another point. I am going to beat this thing into submission. I just tested out the psftp connection and it goes through without prompting me for a passwd, so what is the difference between the authorization for psftp and putty

[James A. Donovan]

Take alook at this document, specifically section 8.2.12, it talks abuout how the different flavors of ssh format ssh2 keys differently and how to work around that...

http://www.tartarus.org/%7Esimon/puttydoc/Chapter8.html

[Jeff Schussele · Accepted solution]

Hi James,

What version putty are you running?
I think some of the earlier versions had trouble.
I'm using 0.53b & I do not have this problem.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Tony Contratto]

Hi James,

When you run puttygen, after generating the key there is a box at the top of the window that has the new public key for OpenSSH (what HPs SecureShell product is based on).

Did you copy what was in that box and paste it into your authorized_keys file on the HP box?

--
Tony

[Belinda Dermody]

Thanks Jeff, I just downloaded 5.3b and it works like a charm. I was running 5.0. Didnt have to make any changes to any of the key or anything else.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi James,

Cool - glad I could help. Sometimes it's the simmple things that are easily overlooked.

And FYI, you've also just closed a security hole as well that was open in 0.52 & lower.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Dominic Dougherty]

I have been ssh with some success on hpx and solaris. I have used exceed,xwin32,ttssh,putty. U can make putty use the keys generated by keygen on hpux and solaris. Using putty gen you can load and convert the key created by ssh to putty format. get the key via ftp(binary) from the server use the menu option (conversions) of the puttygen.exe then click on generate the ppk key which will be used by putty to connect via ssh to ssh server.