Using two different identity files with ssh for rsa remote authentication keys

25May/110

Using two different identity files with ssh for rsa remote authentication keys

I have two different servers I need to connect to, each requiring two different types of remote authentication keys. One requires rsa, the other dss. So I had to make and use two different remote authentication keys, but was unsure as to how to tell my machine to serve them both up. It was, by default, just serving up the rsa key.

What I had to do was create a file called "config" (NO file extension) in the ~/.ssh directory on my machine. I then put two lines in this file:

IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dss

It works like a charm.

For the curious, I'm on windows using the git bash that comes built in with git (NOT cygwin). My ~/.ssh directory looks like this:

I generated these RSA keys with a command similar to this:

ssh-keygen -t dss -f ~/.ssh/id_dss

And copied and pasted the contents of the id_rsa.pub (and id_dss.pub) files into the appropriate place (something like ~/.ssh/authorized_keys) on the remote servers.