Beginners guide to set up SSH?

[fribert]

Well, here I am, feeling stupid  ::)

I would like to set up SSH.
I've installed putty and puttygen here on my Windoze box.
I've created a private / public key pair for putty (SSH-2 RSA).
I've added the private key to putty.
I've copied the public key from the publickey file I saved from puttygen.
As far as I remember from way back then, I have to remove the leadin and leadout of the key, and only have they key itself on one line.
Well anyways, I tried a lot of different formats, so could someone please tell me the setup step by step.

I tried searching the WIKI, but I didn't find an answer, I also tried searching the forum, and found a lot of irrelevant posts , I didn't find any ssh for dummies post.

[flu]

I had got the same problem.
SSH error message: Server refused our key

Solution:

A simple copy from Public-key file generated by puttygen and paste into pfsense GUI (Menu System-Advanced-Secure Shell-Authorizedkeys) generates wrong syntax of authorized_keys file.
Simple copy looks like:

–-- BEGIN SSH2 PUBLIC KEY ----
Comment: "rsa-key-pfsense-admin"
AAAA.....................................................................
.....................................................................
.....................................................................
.....................................................................=
---- END SSH2 PUBLIC KEY ----

but it has to look like:

ssh-rsa AAAA...=

Important! This has to be a single line without newlines!

[fribert]

Thankyou very much! Works like a charm  ;D