Putty and pre-shared keys with Cygwin's sshd

[Andrew DeFaria]

On 01/21/2012 12:34 PM, Andrey Repin wrote:
> Ok, now we're talking. There's indeed a tricky part involved, let me 
> try to cover it for you. On puttygen part, it seems you did it right. 
> (Though, saving public key part is only required for ssh servers 
> compliant with RFC4716.) On connection part... seems like you've 
> supplied the right login name... On server part... First. Make sure 
> your ssh server is configured to allow DSA keys. RSA keys are more 
> common, as I've discovered. 
Let's remain focused. As the subject states, the "server" is Cygwin, 
running on my laptop. All I use is DSA myself. I can ssh to other 
Unix/Linux systems. They can ssh to me using preshared key. I can ssh to 
local host too. *I* use ssh, Cygwin's ssh and preshared keys. *Others* 
often don't use Cygwin and/or don't have OpenSSH installed and say "I 
have putty". I'm trying to help them. If it were me I'd just install 
Cygwin and OpenSSH and be done with it.
> And sometimes servers configured to disallow DSA key authentication, 
> even if they are offering DSA key themselves. Second, double-check 
> server log for reason to refuse the key. The top (IMO) reason to 
> refuse key authentication is wrong access mask on 
> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. It must not be group- or world-writable.
Well I checked my /var/log/sshd.log on my Cygwin laptop and it was of 0 
length. Even tried to reproduce the problem, got the same error but 
/var/log/sshd.log remains empty.
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
A preposition must never be used to end a sentence with.


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