Git SSH setup Permission denied (publickey)

Question

I'm using a VWWare image of Ubuntu 8.04 and experiencing problems while setting up git access over SSH

I get the following output

debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Offering public key: 
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
debug1: Offering public key: 
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
debug1: Offering public key: 
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
debug1: Offering public key: 
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
debug1: Trying private key: /home/jars/.ssh/identity
debug1: PEM_read_PrivateKey failed
debug1: read PEM private key done: type <unknown>
Enter passphrase for key '/home/jars/.ssh/identity': 
debug1: read PEM private key done: type RSA
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
debug1: No more authentication methods to try.
Permission denied (publickey).

I have generated the keys with ssh-keygen -t rsa

and renamed them to identity (private) and ida_rsa (public), because initially they wheren't found by ssh.

I also created a config file as depicted here...

Nothing changed.

Am I missing something or is there generally something wrong with using SSH in VMWare?

Regards

Answer 1

You didn't mention you've installed public key on remote host, so this may be the issue. It needs to be appended to $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys on remote host. If you're using github, you can add the key in the settings for your account.

There is a helper script for installing a key on remote host available on some linux distributions like Ubuntu.

ssh-copy-id remoteuser@remotehost

You probably also do not need to rename anything. If you don't have any non standard requirements and configuring ssh from scratch runnning:

ssh-key-gen

and pressing enter in the prompts should be sufficient. After that you need to install id_rsa.pub on remote host (you may use method described above).