Hi everyone, every time I setup a Pi project server I have a hard time since I can only access that device from the computer where I created the image since I add the SSH key during setup, but I would like to be able to ssh from my android and my other laptop in case I’m out on the road and away from home.

How can I add the other keys for the other devices to a single Pi without using the user name and password as this is also given me problems because ssh wants to try using keys and if it does not find them it just fails instead of asking me to enter the password (also, because it’s not really safe).

  • @mumblerfish
    3•2 months ago

    Not quite sure I understand what you want…

    Each client, the devices you ssh from, has a key pair. You take the public key part of that pair and put it in the authorized_keys file on the server, the device you ssh to. The cannonical paths for your keys and authorized_keys is ~/.ssh/

    You say you cannot reach your pi from your phone? Find the key file named something .pub on your phone, add it to the authorized_keys (as a single line in that file) on your pi. That is it.

    If you also want to drop the username you need to add something like this to your .ssh/config on your phone:

    Host alias_for_pi
  Hostname pi_ipnumber
  User pi_user

    Does this help?

    • 🔰Hurling⚜️Durling🔱OP
      1•2 months ago

      Thanks I tried adding the second ssh pub key to my servers authorized keys, but now it tells me that because the user name is different it wont let me connect

  • @ferngully
    2•2 months ago

    Debian has a package ssh-import-id which you can then run ssh-import-id-gh $githubUsername and it will ingest all the public keys you’ve put in GitHub. Should be able to easily add it to the cloud-init.yaml but I just always install and run this first.

    You can also just copy the keys to the install when you are imaging the SD card.

    Or use Ansible.

  • @BrianTheeBiscuiteer
    2•2 months ago

    I know just how you feel. I have two servers, a phone, and two laptops that all may need to intercommunicate at any given time. For this I use Warpgate: https://github.com/warp-tech/warpgate

    There’s a tiny bit of a learning curve I feel but after setting up a couple connections you’ll get the hang of it. Teleport is a similar solution but I don’t like to use tools I don’t understand and it’s a bit more complex.