Comments on: How To Fix “Server Refused Our Key” Error That Caused By Putty Generated RSA Public Key?

By: dudus

dudus — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:57:09 +0000

I use Ubuntu as a server, I had a problem with “Server refused our key” too, finally I found that by default owner of ‘.ssh’ directory was ‘root’, so because I login as ‘dudus’ I set my login as an owner:

sudo chown dudus:dudus .ssh

and it started to work :)

thanks for all clues

By: tie

tie — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:12:43 +0000

What happened to the good old ‘ssh-keyagent -i -f putty_formatted_key.pub’ ? No need for manual edits really…

By: AL

AL — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:00:50 +0000

Thank you – that was starting to get annoying but now fixed !

By: CSH

CSH — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:00:23 +0000

I have spent so much time to figure out to solve this stupid issue. Finally, your information helped me to solve the annoying problem. Thank you!

By: jh

jh — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:30:57 +0000

This was a big help thanks. Also note, depending on the flavor of OpenSSH, it may be sensitive to certain formatting. For example, I had a Comment in the key, which PuTTygen had appended to the end of the OpenSSH key, like below-
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAIB/TOjXtqAas035vnMO+V1lgLEznAUeQRgQY0Cs2XXQUfvr1BptbsQE/DKYGHPrG6+tsUZKWTM6PncVuHB8K7LjXy8qoUb1A0BNgNCh5fDFfHO6faPlykdDJmMF1IanGbMb14acYIykIjCAfDzEOk7g2Xu8aGAPaB36+7cvAH+edQ== This is my comment here

that key with comment worked fine in Ubuntu Server. Using the same key on RedHat 6 gave me an error. SO,,,,

My fix was to edit the key, remove the comment and trailing space, add a carriage return, AND set the permission to 600.

Good luck!

By: justpressload

justpressload — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:13:37 +0000

There’s an easier way. Just click “Load” in puttygen, and import your id_rsa. You can then save the key in a format putty can use.

By: upandacross

upandacross — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:37:57 +0000

FWIW – I found puttygen will allow me to run putty on my XP and ssh to a unix box without being asked for name, password, or passphrase if:

1. type of key generated is SSH-2 RSA
2. Key comment is user@host as appropriate for you
3. you save the public key to a file on the XP box
4. putty configuration includes setting Category->Connection->SSH->Auth correctly:
a)Attempt authentication using Pageant is checked
b) Attempt “keyboard interactive” auth (SSH2) is checked
c) nothing else is checked
5. Pageant is running and you have added the private key file produced in step 4
6. you copy the public key information at the top of the puttygen screen on you XP machine and put that into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the Unix machine (puttygen’s exported public key file doesn’t produce a working authorized_keys file)
7. permissions are correct on the Unix platform for ~/.ssh (700) and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (600)