Permission Denied (PublicKey)

Posted on September 13, 2018

Hey there. For starters, I am a total noob to server set up. What I need to do is set up SSH log in to my VPS. For reference, I am using Ubuntu 14.04 and I used PuttyGen to make my key.

I connected my public key with my DigitalOcean account, and so my new server was made with an SSH included. I have two questions: What are the details that I would need to send someone to allow them to log into my server with SSH?

And finally, whenever I try to log into my server with SSH from a console, by doing a command like: ssh MYIPADDRESS, it says PublicKey Denied. I am able to connect with my private key no problem, but I know that i should not share that and so I must find otherways to connect. Any help is appreciated, thank you.

So basically, I can connect with Putty using private key, but cannot connect any other way!

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jarland

September 13, 2018

Hey friend!

Great questions. So the reason for the failure in this case may be that your private key is not in the default location for the OpenSSH CLI client. You say your private key works elsewhere, I assume you’re feeding it manually to a different application. You could point OpenSSH to it as well like this:

ssh -i /path/to/privatekey root@serverIP

As for giving someone else access, just ask for their public key and put it in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys on the droplet. They would be able to log in with their own private key then.

Hope this helps :)

Jarland