To create my keys I did teh following:
1 Open PuttyGen and select Generate, move the cursor around the space to generate the key.
2. Enter a "Key comment" for Reference purposes.
3. Enter a "Key Passphrase" then "Confirm Passphrase".
4. Click on "Save Public Key" and save it as a id_rsa.pub on the desktop.
5. Click on "Save Private Key" and save it as a id_rsa.ppk on the desktop.
6. Highlight, and copy the contents of the key window "ssh-rsa....to end, and paste into Notepad. Save as id_rsa.txt.
The id_rsa.txt is then ftp'd over to the ESX Host into the /$home/.ssh and renamed authorized_keys
As I said previously change ownership and permissions, and as far as I am aware, that should be it.
To use, open Putty, enter IP Address, select SSH/Auth from the Catagory tree, browse to my id_rsa.ppk file and click Open.
That is as far as I get.
The problem is that this has been working in our test environment, and I am doing nothing different. The systems are identical except for one factor and that is that the test environment was set up and is being managed from the same laptop. However the Dev environment was set up with one laptop, and managed with another having moved teh .ppk file across. I thought there may be some tie in between hardware and key so I generated a new set of keys with the new laptop, but it still fails. That is why I enquired if there was some sort of cache of keyfile that gets written to, that could be cleared.
The only change I made to the sshd_config was to enable Password Authentication so that if and when the certificate failed I could still log on. This eventually will need to be disabled once I have sorted out this problem.
