Opensshh and Tectia incompatibility

[Doug_95]

I am trying to implement Public Key authentication between an OpenSource SSH client to an HP-UX (11i) based Tectia commercial SSH server. (Version 4.0.3).

The public key from the opensource client works on other opensource servers.

I generated a key pair on another HP-UX server running the same OS and Tectia SSH software, and it worked fine. (Setting up the authorized keys is somewhat different, but I figured it out.)

I compared the two public keys, one from opensource and the other from another Tectia server and the formatting of the two files were very different. For example, the user ID and host name for the Tectia box was before the key in the file, in the opensource it is at the bottom.

Anyone know of a solution to this problem?

Thank you.

[Steven E. Protter]

You might wish to try exchanging public keys between all servers generated by the same ssh server software.

Openssh is great, hp bases Secure Shell on it and I've had no trouble exchanging public keys between hp-ux and Linux servers.

Attaching my procedure, just in case.

SEP

[Doug_95]

Your procedure would work very well if the regular SSH server was in use. To illustrate how different Tectia from ssh.com is...

To create authorized keys....

Create the file ~/.ssh2/authorization

In it put the following:

key id_dsa_1024_a.pub

The file 'id_dsa_1024_a.pub' is a public key file residing in ~/.ssh2.

There is no file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

I should add that I have been very careful to observe my file permissions (644) as that is always a show stopper for authorization keys.

[C. John Soos · Accepted solution]

Doug,

Check the man page for ssh-keygen on one of the OpenSSH servers; note the "-e" and "-i" options, which allow for exporting/importing of keygen files. Output is to stdout, so pipe to a file. Your input of a Tectia keygen file will now look like a OpenSSH keygen file. This worked for me with HP SSH 3.81 on HP-UX 11 and 11i and and Tectia server 4.1 on my "archival" data servers at HP-UX 10.20.

[Julius Razon]

Doug,

Thanks, your procedure works for me. Great!