TurboVNC viewer: invalid privatekey error - cannot connect to server

[mbutler808]

Aloha, I am trying to use TurboVNC to connect to the SlicerMorphCloud server, but I cannot get past an invalid private key error (screenshot attached).

I am able to ssh to my server in the terminal, so my account/password is valid, but I cannot launch the app I need to use. I use Mac OS 10.15.17 (Catalina), I also tried it on Mojave. I have a private key for GitHub. It is saved in ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

I would be grateful for any suggestions. Thanks! M TurboVNCviewer_error.pdf

[dcommander]

Try the 3.0.x pre-release build. This should be fixed now. Refer also to https://github.com/TurboVNC/turbovnc/issues/323#issuecomment-1113640309 for a workaround for TurboVNC 3.0.

[dcommander]

Oh, also the TurboVNC Viewer doesn’t support ED25519 keys. That is slated for a future release. It will handle ECDSA and RSA-256/512.

[mbutler808]

Thank you @dcommander for the quick reply, but I still need help. (1) where can I find the prerelease build? I could only find the current and 2.2.90 and older on sourceforge. Is there a binary mac OS? (2) I tried creating an rsa key, and converting id_rsa to id_rsa.pem as noted in the comment, but TurboVNC viewer 3.0 still doesnʻt work.

Thank you! Marguerite

[dcommander]

Pre-release builds are here: https://turbovnc.org/DeveloperInfo/PreReleases

Rather than try to figure out why the workaround doesn’t work, let’s focus on getting the pre-release build to work. If you are still unable to use an RSA key with the pre-release build, then let me know what error message you are getting and how you are passing the private key to the TurboVNC Viewer.

[mbutler808]

Thanks again - but how do I install the pre-release build? I found instructions on how to clone from github (and I assume build), but there is no dev directory. Are there different instructions somewhere?

`home$ git clone https://github.com/TurboVNC/turbovnc.git -b dev

Cloning into 'turbovnc'...

fatal: Remote branch dev not found in upstream origin`

[mbutler808]

@dcommander Did I miss where I was supposed to specify the location of a private key somewhere? I reinstalled it a couple of times, on two different Macs.

[dcommander]

On the pre-release page, there is a link for Mac packages. Follow that link and download the .dmg file. Open the .dmg and open the installer inside of it. Sorry for the confusion about specifying a key. The TurboVNC Viewer will automatically use ~/.ssh/id_rsa if it exists. So the easiest thing to do is make sure that your chosen private key is at that location. Otherwise you have to specify the key in ~/.ssh/config using the IdentityFile keyword (Google for documentation on the OpenSSH config file) or on the TurboVNC Viewer command line using the SSHKeyFile parameter.

[mbutler808]

Thank you so much @dcommander! That worked!! I am sorry, I was confused by the header on the prerelease page "main branch (3.0.x stable)", thinking that was the stable release version, not the stable pre-release version.
After installing 3.0.1, and an rsa key, it works! Thank you so much Marguerite