Error Permission denied (publickey) when I try to ssh

Question

Note from DigitalOcean Community team: The user @intalix has provided a popular answer to this question here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/error-permission-denied-publickey-when-i-try-to-ssh?comment=169562 Recently I threw out my old linux laptop and set everything up again in my new laptop. The only trouble I have now is not being able to log in to my DO instance via ssh. This instance had one ssh key setup before and in the sshd config it had permitrootlogin set to no. So I created a new ssh key to be able to login from this new laptop. $ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "gitlab" -b 4096 Then added the public key this to the instance. Now I try to login $ ssh user@server I get asked password for this user. I am able to login using the password. This isn’t how I was logging in before. I used to type my ssh passphrase. So I thought this may be because this is a new key and I disabled password authentication in sshd config. After this, I get the error $ ssh user@server Permission denied (publickey) I checked online and set the permission to .ssh folder to 700. Still I get the same error. I can access the online console of the instance, but don’t know what to do. How do I resolve this?

intalix · Accepted Answer

The issue is within your sshd_config file. Here is the ULTIMATE solution to this issue: Log as root to your Ubuntu server Use vim or nano to edit the contents of /etc/ssh/sshd_configEg. vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config or nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config Now go to the very bottom of the file (to the line with PasswordAuthentication) - Change the value next to PasswordAuthentication from no to yes.It should now look like this: # Change to no to disable tunnelled clear text passwords PasswordAuthentication yes Save the file and then run the following command to reload the SSH config:sudo service sshd reload With this done, you can now set up your new SSH key for your LOCAL device.To do this, you can run the following from your LOCAL device, not the server: ssh-copy-id username@droplet.ip (Make sure to replace username with your username on the droplet and droplet.ip with the full IP address of your droplet) With this done, you should be good to go, connecting with SSH keys!

marvynthewall · Answer

Hi, just solve this issue with the same method above.

open with web UI console
wget https://xxxxxxx
cat id_rsa.pub > .ssh/authorized_keys

There seems to be some problem with the setup of Droplet. The .ssh/authorized_keys wasn’t correct originally. The “vim -d id_rsa.pub .ssh/authorized_keys” said they are different. then do the third command. and everything works.
hope this helps.

fkaufusi · Answer

From your local machine, run the ssh command: ssh root@your-droplet-ip

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Error Permission denied (publickey) when I try to ssh

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