Cannot SSH or scp from one droplet to another

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.

You can then upload the key using this command:

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

Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex

Hello,

In addition to what has already been mentioned, you can create the SSH keys on each Droplet with the ssh-keygen command and then copy the public keys to the .ssh/authorized_keys file on the rest of the Droplets as described in the previous comment.

For more information, you can also check out the following tutorial:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-ssh-keys-on-ubuntu-20-04

Let me know how it goes!

Best,

Bobby

Hi @floatinglightseagreenshark,

So, it seems your Droplet’s are using only SSH keys as authentication methods. You’ll need to create SSH keys for your root user and add them to the other Droplet’s .ssh/authorized_keys file in order to have SSH access.

Basically, you login to the first Droplet, you create the SSH key, then copy the contents of the .ssh/id_rsa.pub file and add it to the other 2 Droplet’s file .ssh/authorized_keys. Then repeat for the rest and you would be good to go.