Cannot login with pubkey

Hey friend!

That is interesting. The good news is that you can limit your scope of thought on this to a fairly small set of items. There’s only so much that can go wrong here. Try this:

ssh -vvv root@IP

See if you get anything in the output that tries to explain the failures. Maybe it couldn’t load id_rsa, for example, and advises on permission changes. Seems unlikely to have permission issues though if you used ssh-keygen. So glance at that but if you see nothing, let’s move on.

Double check that the items in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys are valid. One key per line, no line breaks, no weird spaces. Your key should look something like mine:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDLmqjzH1lJ+uTlL2yGjyOcFKdxYFWYLSUdqN5LMRA1YiXHJvTkOo4Ky8w8NmNqJoKwLhxESLNpdUteZbacCRf3I9j57td8IaySk3LFpNK1waDwPcwFlvOv6NtKdwFsgQ0CUqJ6Ya9AUVfTlyePBhH9lKy7gnsloAtHOfGlHdCt5X5f2iB0WU/PPZZskfj79z84dlUPrdfdq8DZmOQDnTEF6XnqaYIqrYXKnPOTovCnOGrc1xJjV+UQ7dZhc/5UCECDK8DEUKZ21aK5htCwhqQFLVV4M6SB7/mDiWXvNx79hKuHDHsHCv6L4YuqHkHAGNtmHq2UxntJ9K6i0DxoMq/1 jarlanddonnell@Jarlands-iMac.local

Also unlikely that key login is disabled on the droplet, so I’m kind of thinking you may find something there in authorized_keys.

Jarland

Hello there,

You can check our article on How to Upload an SSH Public Key to an Existing Droplet

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/add-ssh-keys/to-existing-droplet/

You can access the droplet from the DigitalOcean console and then temporary enable the PasswordAuthentication on your droplet and access the droplet with a password to upload the ssh-key.

If you haven’t created new pair of keys you’ll need to do that first.

You can enable PasswordAuthentication for your Droplet by modifying your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. Once set to Yes restart the SSH service and connect via an SSH client for a more stable connection. You can then modify your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file to add the appropriate public key.

This change can be made from the DigitalOcean’s console. If you’re having issues accessing the console you can then reach to our amazing support team that can help you further with this.

To enable the PasswordAuthentication follow these steps:

2. Login to the console on the DigitalOcean website.
3. Type sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
4. Change PasswordAuthentication from “no” to “yes” and save the file
5. Open a terminal on your computer and type ssh username@[hostname or IP address] or if on a Windows box use PuTTY for password login making sure authentication parameters aren’t pointing to a private key
6. Login with a password
7. Type sudo nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
8. Paste public key text here and save the file
9. Type sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
10. Change PasswordAuthentication from “yes” to “no” and save the file
11. Log out and attempt to log back in (if using PuTTY make sure you set up auth parameters to point to your private key)

You can then upload the key using this command:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/mykey user@droplet

Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex