Lafayette CollegeTechnology Help
If you have been granted access to a server at Lafayette, you’ll need to use SSH to connect. For security reasons, we use SSH public keys for authentication. The following instructions detail how to create SSH key pairs for use on UNIX-based and Windows systems.
Mac OS X, Linux, or other UNIX-based system can use the built in ssh-keygen command for creating key pairs. This command generates keys in OpenSSH format, which is the desired format for Lafayette Systems. Please do not provide your key in PEM or SECSH Public Key File Format.
The SSH-keygen tool, which produces a file named id_rsa.pub that is in the appropriate format, stores the private key in $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa and the public key in $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub in the user’s home directory. The user should then copy the id_rsa.pub to $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys in his home directory on the remote machine. It also asks for a passphrase. The passphrase may be empty to indicate no passphrase (host keys must have an empty passphrase), or it may be a string of arbitrary length. Instead of RSA, DSA can also be used. The steps to create authorization keys by using the SSH-keygen tool are as follows:
This information is based on the ssh-keygen Wikipedia page.
If you are using Windows, then you will generate your key using PuTTY by copying and pasting the key from the Key Generator using the instructions available at:
By default PuTTY generates keys in PEM or SECSH Public Key File Format. This is not the desired format so please copy and paste your key as described in the directions above so that you can send it in OpenSSH format.