Question

Issues with public SSH key authentication on droplet

Hello,

I recently regenerated my public/private keys for SSH access to all of my droplets. I successfully updated the public key on all accounts except for one. I used the cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub command to display the public key in Terminal and copied it to the Settings > Security > SSH Keys section on my client’s account. After doing that, I tried to login using SSH via the Terminal, but Permission denied (publickey) is returned. I have reviewed many related issues on Stack Overflow and other tech help websites, but nothing has helped resolve my issue.

Can someone help me out with resolving this issue?

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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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• May 28, 2022

Hello,

Adding the SSH key to the Settings > Security > SSH Keys section does not actually add the key to any of the existing Droplets.

In order to add the SSH key to an existing Droplet, you need to access it first via SSH and add the public key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on each server.

If you don’t have access to any of the existing Droplets, you can follow the steps here on how to recover your access:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/resources/lost-ssh-key/

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby

JonsJava • May 28, 2022

One possible issue:

  • Permissions issue on the file - too accesable

Solution for this issue:

chmod 600 /path/to/file

Another possible issue:

  • Invalid newline and/or extra line in file

Solution(s) for this issue:

dos2unix /path/to/file

edit file and check for extra newlines that shouldn’t be there (even after running dos2unix

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