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Connecting via Mac os x after I set up the ssh through Putty

Posted on August 7, 2016

So I set up my droplet with a SSH key with putty on my windows 7 machine. Now when I try to log onto it with my macbook it says that my password is wrong. Though I know for a fact it is correct. Can I just not go from one to the other? I have tried to look it up but haven’t found a definite answer. Thanks



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Hi!

PuTTy and other SSH clients are simply a way to connect to the OpenSSH daemon on your Droplet. It doesn’t matter which client you used to set up your Droplet, so you should be able to access it from your macbook as well.

However, if you generated the SSH key using PuTTygen, you will need to convert it to the OpenSSH format as PuTTy saves its private keys in its own format. In order to do that, open your PuTTy key in PuTTygen and click on Export OpenSSH under Conversions. Then, transfer the resulting file to your macbook.

You can use it by passing it along with -i to the ssh command, like this:

ssh -i /path/to/exported/key user@ip

Or, move it to ~/.ssh/id_rsa, making sure that you don’t overwrite any existing key that you might already have and need, and ssh should automatically pick it up and use it without having to pass the -i option to it.

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