[thelist] Going crazy with SSH telnet

Gina K. Anderson gina at sitediva.com
Fri Aug 11 12:54:36 CDT 2000


Hi all,

I have been trying to set up, as cheaply as possible, my SSH capabilities with
my hosting package. I have about three hairs left, and I could use some help. If
anyone has any knowledge about this subject, I'd love some guidance before I
have a stroke :P It has to do with RSA keys and ssh-keygen:

I don't telnet very often, but when I do I really need to. My hoster wanted me
to give them $25 to generate a key and install it on my server, however, they
gave me a free option to generate and upload my own key. I can do this through
my control panel. Since I am not planning to stay with this host long, I decided
there had to be a way I could do this myself and save the bucks--always the
cheapskate, plus I like to learn...this only brings me pain every once in a
great while :)

Okay, my host is Linux/Apache. I have a Win98 machine. Stupid me thinks an
PGP-generated RSA key might work, and uploaded my public key. Then I tried to
connect using a freeware SSH Telnet program called TerraTerm SSH, no luck.

So I downloaded the ridiculously priced (for me) SecureCRT. Generated a key,
uploaded it, and everything works. However, I'm not going to pay their price. I
hoped TTSSH would work with that key, but not a chance. Supposedly, I need to
run a "real" RSA key by using ssh-keygen. I can't figure out how to use it. The
manual pages seem to read like I need to be the server administrator to use
ssh-keygen, and are geek-speak even to me :). There seems to be no way to
generate one on your local machine you can just copy and paste out of.

I feel like I am back to square one and have to give up the $25 bucks for all
this to work. All I need is an RSA key that will allow me to SSH telnet into my
account, be able to copy and paste that sucker into my control panel area, and
I'm set...now, how do I get an ssh-keygen RSA key if all I have access to is my
FTP space?

Thanks,
Bald Gina







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