On 20/07/11 12:47 PM, Mark Rogers wrote:
Ideally what I want to do is the other way around, in that I want to generate the key pairs on the server and copy the relevant key to the clients so that they all share the same key (there won't be many users and I just want to give them a key rather than have them create keys themselves).
Hi Mark,
You can use puttygen on the Linux system to generate a keypair in PuTTY's PPK format, but you'll definitely want one keypair per user.
But just like you don't know your users' passwords, I wouldn't be comfortable having a copy of their private key. There's also the added hassle of transferring the private key over an existing secure channel.
Have you checked out Windows puttygen.exe GUI? Users can generate their own keypair in a few clicks, when it's done it prints the public part that the user can safely send for you to authorise.
Cheers, Rob.