How To Generate SSH Keys for use on the Grid User Interface

Below are instructions for creating an SSH key pair for Unix-like environments (including Linux and Mac OS X) and Windows. The Grid-Ireland Grid User Interface (gridui) uses public key authentication for a secure login.

The public key file should be sent, with your chosen username, to grid-ireland-mgr@cs.tcd.ie and your user interface account will be set up.

Unix

For Unix-like systems, we assume the OpenSSH suite. To generate a new key pair use the ssh-keygen command:

 $ ssh-keygen -t rsa
 Generating public/private rsa key pair.
 Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa): /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa
 Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
 Enter same passphrase again:
 Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.
 Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
 The key fingerprint is:
 37:72:42:06:5f:55:e3:11:47:5e:6b:58:83:9b:94:8a user@host

The contents of id_rsa.pub should look something like the following (in this example the key has been broken into multiple lines, but in reality it should be a single line without breaks):

 ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAqNpbus3AGB4YU5bnCkSxNdz
 B92KHXOKdsE1//sz86cTkRlpjCBdfE5JlO4jsTOsNU7efqjU4k+gm3LrdY4
 EgeH9HB+XpIqHcmSRWrKBNuE3ZvxeyhDKm68j0V31Id7QANpI9gIsRoRygC
 y0itionqb6/k4JrBb41FNCwzoSGits= user@host

Windows

For Windows, we recommend the PuTTY suite of tools. PuTTYgen can be used to generate an SSH key pair usable with the PuTTY SSH client.

Key generation is covered in chapter 8 of the PuTTY manual. Follow the instructions in section 8.2.9 to save the public key to a file. The file format should be similar to the example above.