So what's the magic step to make shared key authentication work between Putty on a Windows box as the client, and Mandriva 2007.1 SSH server. I create my key pair in PuttyGen about every different way that's possible and I load the private key into Putty successfully and place my public key from Putty into user's authorized_keys with "cat key.pub >> authorized_keys" on SSH server, but I always get the message "server rejected our key". Anybody have any idea as to what I am missing? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Mike

try authorized_keys2 instead of authorized_keys, seen that work going across various flavors of linux.

Good tip, but I checked into it and my distro uses the authorized_keys file as opposed to the authorized_keys2 file. Appreciate it just the same though. Mike

does it work without any ~/.sshd/authorized_keys? also, check the formatting of the file; any leading characters, line breaks, etc. I believe that it should be one long line.

Apparently it is not just a putty issue. I tried using shared key authentication between two linux boxes, and had the same issue. Shared key authentication works just fine for my CentOS box, but when I try to use it on my Mandriva box it resorts back to password authentication. I looked at the sshd_config file and it looks correct, it is almost identical to the sshd_config on my CentOS box. It really has me scratching my head. Did you mean ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in the line above? I don't see how it could work without anything in that file, that is what it checks against. Perhaps I am misunderstanding your post. Thanks, Mike

Take a gander at your sshd_config file there should be an AuthorizedKeysFile directive that dictates where the file should be located.

Also check the StrictModes directive, if it is enabled and the key file is writeable to anyone besides the user it will not use public key authentication for that user as anyone could append their own key to the file and gain access as that user. A chmod 600 on the authorized_keys (or whatever it is called) should fix that.

That was it, I had rw access for the group and r access for everybody. I changed it to 600 and now it works. Thanks! Mike

Glad it worked out for you.

Too bad it took 20 days

At least it is working for you now.

No worries, thanks for the help.