Documentation: Using ssh-keygen as advertised did not seem to generate usable key pairs

usgs / pdl

Product Distribution Layer

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Documentation: Using ssh-keygen as advertised did not seem to generate usable key pairs #126

Open mhearne-usgs opened 4 years ago

mhearne-usgs commented 4 years ago

Doing this:

ssh-keygen -t dsa -b 1024 -C 'Comment describing key' -f <keyfilename>

caused errors in the PDL client like this:

Invalid PEM structure, '-----BEGIN...' missing

Substituting the command:

openssl genrsa -out mykey.pem 4096

instead seemed to solve the problem.

The pdl documentation should be updated to reflect this.

It might also be nice to know why the old way stopped working. :)

jmfee-usgs commented 4 years ago

I think this is from using a newer version of ssh-keygen, which uses an OPENSSH format. Adding -m PEM to the command should use the original format.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C '<comment>' -f <keyfilename> -m PEM