SSH connection issue(s)

Hi,

I am having some real problems connecting to my VPS via SSH. I am very much a newcomer to this world but I have followed the Digital Ocean tutorial as well as taken advice from friends (and Google) but unfortunately I am not getting anywhere.

I am using Secure Shell, an official Google extension for Chrome OS.

The problem is that:

I cannot connect via SSH at all. Here are the steps I am taking…

a) Login via VNC from Digital Ocean control panel as user ‘adt’ with password b) Type command ‘ssh-keygen -t rsa’ and follow instructions to create two keys called id_rsa and id_rsa.pub c) Use command ‘ssh-copy-id adt@...’ (my IP address for VPS) d) Follow instructions and check that correct public key has been added to authorized_keys file e) Attempt SSH login using Secure Shell (Chrome OS extension mentioned above). I import both public and private key into the client. f) I am just asked, as normal, for my user password, not passphrase. Occasionally I have been asked to enter passphrase for id_rsa files and when doing this it seems to fail, no acknowledgement of password being entered correctly or even incorrectly.

Basically, I am not seeing any of my SSH sessions as being encrypted with SSH keys.

I have had this working before but that was when I created a Droplet with an existing SSH key I uploaded to the Digital Ocean control panel.

I am pretty certain I’m doing something wrong as I have tried on numerous Droplets but cannot get anywhere using the method above. It has been advised that I generate keys using a machine that is not the VPS but this is not easy using Chrome OS and I would have thought that as long as the keys are generated, it should not matter where they come from. If it does matter, then why are you able to generate a key on the VPS?

I have seen some information on the web pointing out that OpenSSH does not generate in the proper RSA format (this seems a bit counter-productive if true!)

I’m really just looking for some guidance, if possible!

Thanks in advance.