Linking my VPS to a Virtual Desktop. Authentication Error

@Eskyocha

Unless you’re using PuTTy to log in to the Droplet, a private key generated by PuTTy won’t work with a standard shell log in – those keys are specific to PuTTy and would need to be used by PuTTy only.

If you’re using something such as:

ssh user@ip -i /path/to/private.key

I would recommend generating a second key pair on the Droplet itself and storing the private key to your local environment and placing the public key in your authorized_keys file.

You can generate a standard OpenSSH key by using ssh-keygen.

RSA Key

ssh-keygen -a 500 \
           -b 4096 \
           -C "" \
           -E sha256 \
           -o \
           -q \
           -t rsa

ed25519 Key

ssh-keygen -a 500 \
           -C "" \
           -E sha256 \
           -o \
           -q \
           -t ed25519

PuTTy works a little differently than your standard Terminal emulator (such as Terminal on MacOS or even most linux distros). They keys it uses are only usable by PuTTy, FileZilla, and a few other select software applications.

While PuTTy will generate an OpenSSH Key, it’s often easier to generate one on the Droplet and then use it instead so you don’t have to worry about the differences between the two.