Canonical SSH 'public key' answer?

Question

Is there a need for a question (or set of questions) and answers around SSH publickey refusal queries?

For stuff like,

• Why do I get "Permission denied (publickey)" when trying to SSH from local Ubuntu to a Amazon EC2 server?
• Permission denied (publickey) when trying to ssh into an ec2 machine (-v details included)
• ssh error with publickey for normal user
• Permission denied (publickey) error
• Not able to do ssh(without asking passowrd) to remote System using Authentication Keys
• EC2 instance always ask me to enter passphrase for the pem during connection

I was thinking along the lines of setting up key pairs, permissions, remembering to ssh in as the right user, using -v -v to get more diagnostics, settings in the sshd_config file, etc.

However, thinking about it further, I wondered how much of that is on-topic for ServerFault, rather than SuperUser or Linux/UNIX? Just thought I'd gather some opinions.

Answer 1

Personally, I find a lot of SSH usage questions to be more SU-worthy. However, it is the glue that holds together a lot of our networks so it's one of those gray area things.

Given that, I do see value in a question/answer pair that covers the major bases in one concise set. It shouldn't have an encyclopedia of how public-key works, but address the core cause(es) and how errors manifest; the deep-dive can happen after those two.

Answer 2

Okay, so it seems like a reasonably popular idea - how do I / we make it happen? Do we just wait for an opportune question or does someone write a new one, or do we go and find an old one?