Help with public key access

[VibrantLife]

Greetings,
This is my first post here. Our church doesn't really have a lot of technical depth at present, and we are looking for someone who can help us understand and presumably set up public key access. We see where to go in cPanel, but we're not quite sure where to go from there. We're happy to pay someone who is just a bit patient to help us out with this.

Best to all,
Elchanan

[Elite]

What are you trying to achieve? Auto creation of cpanel accounts??

Basically you will need to enter the access key into whatever software/script you are using on your website to handle the order process, this will allow the software to access the cpanel api

It is often recommended not to allow auto sign up to prevent fraud etc

[ZYV]

I suppose they just want to set up public key SSH authentification? In such case I am not really sure this is supported by Dathon. The best bet is to ask Andrew if the current OpenSSH setup is set to use ~/.ssh/authorization file.

[AndrewT]

Yes, SSH key authentication can be setup on all servers. The key needs to be generated and stored in .ssh/authorized_keys and it needs to be configured/saved on your own PC.

[VibrantLife]

Thank you. I open the GnuPG Key Generator and am about to create a key. What are the advantages/disadvantages of choosing 1024/2048/4096 key strength?

Elchanan

[AndrewT]

You'll want to generate the keys via SSH (or even puttygen). Searching Google for "ssh key generation" will return quite a few helpful results. Below is a link to one such result with a How To for PuTTY.

http://www.howtoforge.com/ssh_key_based_logins_putty

[VibrantLife]

Thanks. I have Putty installed and am looking at the instructions you suggested.

Questions:

1. For the host name, do I enter the domain (abc.com) or www.abc.com, or an IP address (which)?

2. For the Auto-Login Username, do I use the cPanel domain userid, or any name I wish, or ???

Thanks,
Elchanan

[ZYV]

1) Doesn't matter
2) cPanel username

Personally I prefer ssh2-keygen, but I recall that putty and puttygen works fine under wine.

[benklocek]

Type of encryption?

Does it matter if it's rsa or dsa?

I can't seem to get it to work properly.

[JackT]

Is ~/.ssh chmod'd to 700 and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys to 600?

As for the whole dsa vs rsa debate, I use 2048 bit RSA. I don't think DSA can support key lengths more than 1024, according to the man page.

[ZYV]

user@box:~$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

FTW!

[benklocek]

Permissions

I ended up just using rsa, but the permissions on .ssh were getting me. Needs to be 700 as jack says.