That did throw me for my first of many "what the heck" moments. I soon created barney with the right command. I misunderstood a good handful of things in trying to get barney's ssh squared away, so I moved on to wilma. I needed to have directories and files set with proper ownership, e.g. wilma needs to own .ssh . One thing I was reading wrong was that I thought authorized_keys was a directory that contained files. Not so.

We're getting deep down into the weeds of this thread, and I've gotten a lot of great help on a nebulus and moving target, but we get fewer eyes down here, and I don't want to punish the people who are helping me by keeping it going forever. I'm close with wilma and I think I'm gonna get over on betty. Here's my latest attempt with wilma:

Thanks all for comments.

root@third:/home/wilma/.ssh# echo id_rsa.pub >>authorized_keys

The authorized_keys file is not a list of filenames; it is a list of keys themselves. At this point you should just have done something akin to

$ cat id_rsa.pub > authorized_keys
[download]

HTH.

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🦛

better >> than > to avoid clobbering. Alternatively ssh-add might be available.

You'd have saved yourself a lot of time and effort if you'd read the DigitalOcean tutorials on this subject.

You'd have saved yourself a lot of time and effort if you'd read the DigitalOcean tutorials on this subject.

Maybe. I wouldn't say the time was wasted when I needed to read up so much with unix again, along with a new vendor to me, DigitalOcean. Also, I just had to make half a dozen big mistakes on my own time, but success was achieved 12 days after my first droplet formed. I may have twisted my arm off patting my own back when I used vi correctly, but ALL THREE TIMES, I locked myself out. Somewhere along the line, I found the button for "send me a new root password."

Furthermore, I wouldn't call the process as linear as digital ocean might make it seem with their hyperlinks. set-up-ssh-keys has many pointers, but I don't think it has anything about chown'ing and chmod'ing .ssh and authorized_keys. Many hyperlinks don't make the search more specific.

The above gives this line of code, which I could never get to work:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh username@remote_host "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

Similarly, I couldn't get this to work, and not for lack of trying:

ssh-copy-id -i id_rsa.pub wilma@143.110.153.42

What did work was doing it from scratch. From my laptop:

scp id_rsa.pub root@164.90.158.33::/home/fred/.ssh

Log-in as root one last time:

root@fourth:/home/fred# cd .ssh/
root@fourth:/home/fred/.ssh# ls -al
total 12
drwx------ 2 fred fred 4096 Sep 26 23:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 fred fred 4096 Sep 26 23:36 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  419 Sep 26 23:38 id_rsa.pub
root@fourth:/home/fred/.ssh# cat id_rsa.pub > authorized_keys
root@fourth:/home/fred/.ssh# chown fred:fred authorized_keys 
root@fourth:/home/fred/.ssh# chmod 600 authorized_keys 
-rw------- 1 fred fred 419 Sep 26 23:43 authorized_keys
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 419 Sep 26 23:38 id_rsa.pub
root@fourth:/home/fred/.ssh#
[download]

And finally, log-in as fred:

fred@fourth:~/.ssh$ ls -al
total 16
drwx------ 2 fred fred 4096 Sep 26 23:43 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 fred fred 4096 Sep 26 23:46 ..
-rw------- 1 fred fred  419 Sep 26 23:43 authorized_keys
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  419 Sep 26 23:38 id_rsa.pub
fred@fourth:~/.ssh$ ..
fred@fourth:~$ ls -al
total 32
drwxr-xr-x 4 fred fred 4096 Sep 26 23:46 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 26 20:57 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 fred fred  925 Sep 26 23:39 .bash_aliases
-rw-r--r-- 1 fred fred  220 Sep 26 20:57 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r-- 1 fred fred 3771 Sep 26 20:57 .bashrc
drwx------ 2 fred fred 4096 Sep 26 23:46 .cache
-rw-r--r-- 1 fred fred    0 Sep 26 20:57 .cloud-locale-test.skip
-rw-r--r-- 1 fred fred  807 Sep 26 20:57 .profile
drwx------ 2 fred fred 4096 Sep 26 23:43 .ssh
fred@fourth:~$
[download]

Thanks all for criticisms and comments,