UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I had generated a ssh2 key on my AIX box, to receive files from other AIX and Linux systems.

Key Name: id_ssh2_server.pub

However this ssh2 key (both public and private keys) has been overwritten, while I was generating another ssh2 key. Now the earlier configured target systems are not able to connect to my AIX box.

Is there any way to restore the earlier key?
Unfortunately the tape backups are not taken for the directory where key is residing.

Do you or the system administrator responsible for that box have any backup where the keyfiles are contained?

Sounds like the remote systems actively connect to your AIX node, so I think the key pair should have been generated over there, and might be available from there as well?

Only the client side account should generate the keys and the server side account would accept the public key into the authorized_keys file if the service side account agrees to being connected to, so your server side account should never have the private key from the client side account.

The public key is very likely still on the client side account. If it is the client side that has been lost and there are no backups, you will need to create a new key and then get the public key onto the servers it needs to connect to.


If you need to open the connection the other way around, then your definition of what is client and what is server is switched and you should really generate a new key for that connection only. The reason for this is that if you have client on host-A trusted to talk to the server host-B and server host-C and you also send the private key to host-B so host-B can act as a client to what now becomes server host-A, it will also be trusted to connect to server host-C because it has the private key.


Does that make sense of have I confused things?



Robin