Can't SSH into DigitalOcean

[hackerchick]

I've got SecureCRT 7.3.4 on Windows and a VPS on DigitalOcean running Ubuntu 14.04

I tried giving DigitalOcean the public key created by SecureCRT but it said it was invalid.

So I went into cygwin and created a public key with ssh-keygen -t rsa
This one DigitalOcean accepted

So then, in SecureCRT, Global Options: SSH. I set Public Key to "use identity or certificate file" and pointed it to the id_rsa.pub I created in cygwin.

I then attempted to ssh into my DigitalOcean instance but I get this error:
"Public-key authentication with the server for user root failed.
Please verify username and public/private key pair"

I'm probably doing something stupid but I can't figure out what else to try - can anyone help me out?

Thanks!
Abby

[bgagnon]

Hi Abby,

I tried giving DigitalOcean the public key created by SecureCRT but it said it was invalid.

Although you have a workaround to this issue, if you want to determine what happened, I would need additional information about how you created the keypair in SecureCRT and how you tried "giving it to DigitalOcean".

Is the private key, id_rsa (no extension), available in the same location as the .pub file?

It is the private key file that you will use on the client-side to "sign" your public-key so it's important you either configure SecureCRT to point to it or have it available in the same directory as the public-key file.

[clay584]

Originally Posted by hackerchick

So then, in SecureCRT, Global Options: SSH. I set Public Key to "use identity or certificate file" and pointed it to the id_rsa.pub I created in cygwin.

You point SecureCRT to use id_rsa, not id_rsa.pub.