I found that somewhere on the 'net and it ended a few hours of beating my head against the wall. That $SHELL was the magic trick I needed to make the agent run and stay running. The method that worked for me was to use: You must convert your private key (.pem file) into this format (.ppk file) as follows in order to connect to your instance using PuTTY. PuTTY provides a tool named PuTTYgen, which converts keys to the required format for PuTTY. The Linux analog to this scenario is accomplished using ssh-agent (the pageant analog) and ssh-add (the analog to adding a private key to pageant). PuTTY does not natively support the private key format for SSH keys. host would, of course, have to be holding the public key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. The analog for this is that Linux, acting as an ssh client, has an agent holding a decrypted private key so that when TCSgrad types "ssh host" the ssh command will get his private key and go without being prompted for a password. Then, the ssh client, putty, can log in to machines where his public key is listed as "authorized" without a password prompt. Try entering a host name to connect to in that field, and click Open.
When the software starts, you should get a window with the title 'PuTTY Configuration' with a field Host Name in the upper middle part. That is, there is an agent (pageant) which holds a decrypted copy of a private key so that the passphrase only needs to be put in once. On Windows 10, scroll down until you see 'PuTTY'.
I think what TCSgrad was trying to ask (a few years ago) was how to make Linux behave like his Windows machine does. Should convert an existing puttygen public key to OpenSSH format. ssh-keygen -i -f keyfile.pub > newkeyfile.pub You've sent this key back to the user 15 times. Password even though everyone else's keys are working fine, and No error message in the auth log except, no key found, trying HOWEVER, sysadmins, you invariably get the wonky key file that throws Key pair in puttygen, copy the public key and paste it into a textįile with the extension. The Solution: When you get to the public key screen in creating your Puts some data in different areas and adds line breaks. Public key using puttygen it won't work on a linux server. However, what isn't addressed is that when you save the Puttygen provides a neat utility to convert a linux private key to The most common way to make a key on Windows is using Putty/Puttygen. I keep forgetting this so I'm gonna write it here. If all you have is a public key from a user in PuTTY-style format, you can convert it to standard openssh format like so: ssh-keygen -i -f keyfile.pub > newkeyfile.pub