hi people,

i reinstalled my server with centos 7 to get familiar with it...

i have a laptop that im using cygwin on to ssh into the centos 7 server.

i ran ssh-keygen -t rsa on the server and now in .ssh i have a public and private key created.

i copied the public key from the server to my C:\cygwin64\home\Administrator\.ssh\known_hosts file

now when i input:
ssh userontheserver@serversip

it asks for the passphrase which i created when i did the keygen
on the server

when i put the passphrase in it says permission denied
and returns me to the command line

what am i doing wrong?

do i have the steps correct?

am i right in saying that you need to have the servers public key in your known_hosts file on the client computer to get communication working?

ok so i got it working...had the username wrong...duh!!! was user1 not user

anyway i have a few questions:

1)how come when i regenerated the keys on the server my other laptop using xshell still connected without a problem? i thought it would complain that the key was different...

2)how come when it asked for the password i put in the user password to get it working not the passphrase at key creation...

thanks for the help...

If the users password is working then you did not setup public/private keys correctly.

The public key is copyied to hosts authorized_keys file not the known_hosts file. It also must have 600 permissions.