Generating keys

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Revision as of 14:43, 7 December 2010 by Jack (talk | contribs)
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This is a tutorial for creating keys for use with pony

The command:

ssh-kegen -t dsa

will generate a DSA key pair that we can use to authenticate ourselves.

After pressing enter you'll be asked for a file location, with a default name of id_dsa located in your ~/.ssh/ directory. It's a good idea to give it a useful name (for our purpose, 'pony' will do). You'll also be asked for an optional pass phrase for the key. You can skip this by pressing enter if you like.

You'll now have two files, 'pony' and 'pony.pub' in your ~/.ssh/ directory:

-rw------- 1 switch switch  736 Dec  7 04:46 pony
-rw-r--r-- 1 switch switch  602 Dec  7 04:46 pony.pub

Notice that 'pony.pub' is world readable, but the (private) pony key is only readable by you, the owner.