@dynamicdentaledu

Have you configured SSH to allow public key authentication, created the proper user directories, and set the proper permissions on them (for that specific user)?

For example, using danturcotte as the user, we'd create:

/home/danturcotte
/home/danturcotte/.ssh

and

/home/danturcotte/.ssh/authorized_keys

This could be done using:

mkdir -p /home/danturcotte/.ssh \
&& touch /home/danturcotte/.ssh/authorized_keys

You would then paste your public key in authorized_keys and save.

Once done, you'd need to make sure the proper permissions are set on the directories and the file. We can do that using:

chown -R danturcotte:danturcotte /home/danturcotte/*

chmod 700 /home/danturcotte/.ssh \
&& chmod 644 /home/danturcotte/.ssh/authorized_keys

If you've not already, you can modify your user and see the users home directory using usermod.

usermod -d /home/danturcotte danturcotte

Now you want to make sure Public Key Authentication is enabled, so you'll need to open up:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

Search for PubkeyAuthentication and make sure it's set to yes

For security, I'd recommend only using PKA, so I would turn PasswordAuthentication off by setting it to no. Quick note though, if you don't have an SSH Key setup for root, you will lock yourself out with this setting, so you'd need to make sure a key is setup for root as well, or create a sudo user so you can run root-level commands by escalating.

Once those changes have been made, you'll need to restart SSH.

service ssh restart