Build a Server and have your SSH public key baked right in
Happy new year! Here on the 13th day of this fine year we’re excited to bring you the first of many new features.
Starting today, all VPS’s and Cloud Servers may be built with an SSH key for the root login instead of generating and emailing a random root password.
A new tab, Keys, has been added to the Servers management interface. To get started, go there and add your own public SSH key. Be sure to upload your public key, not your private key.
When you build (or rebuild) a server and select one of your SSH keys, that public key will be added to the root user. Additionally, to enhance security, password-based logins will be disabled entirely for SSH logins. You may reenable them by removing the last few lines appended to /etc/ssh/sshd_config.
Password based logins from the console remain enabled so that the ‘Reset Password’ function will still work when combined with a login via the AJAX console.
Creating an SSH key
If you are new to SSH keys, we recommend that you build your server with a root password to start. Learn how to configure SSH key based logins when you have a functioning password and way to login without an SSH key. Once you have the SSH key login worked out then begin to create servers using your SSH key.
On Linux, OS X, and *BSD systems, use the ssh-keygen command. By default, the file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub will contain the public key.
On Windows it will vary based on your SSH client. PuTTY is probably the most common; PuTTY’s puttygen.exe application will help you generate keys.
The Keys tab will accept uploads of your public key in a few different formats, so the native formats for both OpenSSH and PuTTY should be fine without any conversion necessary.
Comments/questions
Your comments and questions (and suggestions for more features) are always welcome!
The Zerigo team