ssh notes

ssh-notes.md

Just a basic memory aid.

Create keys

Create a new key using the email address as label

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "name@example.com"

Accept the default name (~/.ssh/id_rsa) or provide another for multiple identities

Using different keys

Force ssh to use a specific private key

ssh -i ~/.ssh/<private-key-file> user@host.com

To automatically select identity file to use per host, add entries to ~/.ssh/config

Host hostname1 hostname1.server.com
  HostName hostname1.server.com
  User root
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<private-key-file1>
Host hostname2
  IdentifyFile ~/.ssh/<private-key-file2>

Host - the list of names that can match HostName - the real hostname User - the user to log in as, if you don't want to specify on the command line IdentifyFile - the private key to use

Remember to actually specify a different identity file name when using ssh-keygen

There is a typo: IdentifyFile should be IdentityFile (7th letter should be 't'). This happened in two places.