On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 12:44:07AM +0200, Sebastian Haag wrote: > Hi, > > I´m using dropbear 0.48.1 and have a little problem with the public/private > keys. > > I generated the public and private keys with dropbearkey and copied the > public > key to "/etc/dropbear/dropbear_rsa_host_key" (on the SERVER, where 'dropbear' > is running/should run). This file is readable and writeable only to user > root.
> When i want to start dropbear (with 'dropbear'), i get the following message: > "premature exit: string too long". The /etc/dropbear/dropbear_rsa_host_key file is the server's _private_ key, used for all sessions (even password authed) so that the client knows that it's talking to the same server each time. This is independent of using public keys for user auth. If you generate a key using dropbearkey and copy the private key part to dropbear_rsa_host_key, it should work fine. If you then want to use public key authentication, on the client you have to generate a key, then paste the public part into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server. If you're using dbclient then you'd generate it with dropbearkey and specify it with "dbclient -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.db", otherwise you'd use the client-specific key generator - dbclient for OpenSSH, PuTTYgen for putty, etc. Cheers, Matt
