UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

is it possible to download/retrieve a public SSH key when you are logged in to the remote machine rather than sending the key, for example with ssh-copy-id from your local machine to the remote machine?

I can only ssh into one direction (from the remote machine into the local machine), not the other.

Thanks for any hints.

Best regards,

Gary

Why not, assuming valid permissions. How do you get into the remote machine from local?

I don't. I initiate the ssh only from the remote.

I could use scp, of course. But apart from that I wouldn't know what to do. Is it sufficient when I just create the public_keys directory on the remote machine (doesn't have one yet) and then scp my public key in there? I tried that but it didn't work.

BTW, both machines Mac with Bash.

Thanks!

Gary

I'd strongly recommend to reread the ssh man page to make sure you know what you are doing: Append your public key to this file - scp alone would not be sufficient. If your key is the first and only one, you'd still need to rename the file after copying it over.

OK, I used the following to copy the public key of my local machine to the remote machine (into which I type the command):

Code:

scp user@domain.com:.ssh/id_rsa.pub ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

After typing my password, it worked. A "cat" revealed the contents of the public key (albeit with the local network name at the end; i.e. the name of the machine in the local network (like user@machine.local); not the external domain name of this machine (user@domain.com)).

However, after quitting and reopening the terminal of the remote computer, I tried to ssh and it didn't work. It is still asking for a password :-(

What could have gone wrong? Am I still missing something? Do I need to restart the whole computer (I can't do that right now, because its a server)?

Thanks a lot!

Gary

Don't restart the whole server. There is nothing in memory that is affecting this.

Consider the permissions of the files in ./ssh on both sides and the permissions of the directory itself too. There are requirements stated in the manual pages and the code checks that the files are not open to easy attack (copy or alter) by other users.

This is the most likely reason for the SSH connection failure.

What output do you get from the command? If there is nothing useful, and a -v flag for more detail. if still nothing, you can add up to three -v flags for even more detail, but it can generate a huge amount of trace very quickly.



Robin