Parts related to SSH public key authentication that need some improvement

[Csipak Attila]

I have a couple of remarks related to SSH public key authentication, which seem to be overlapping, so I won't open separate reports on these:

1. SSH keys chapter ( https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/openssh-server.html#openssh-keys ) instructs the reader to generate a key pair using DSA. Googled rsa vs. dsa, result generally recommended RSA for various reasons. While I'm no security expert, neither do I want a flamewar on this, I guess the server guide should also consistently recommend RSA over DSA.

2. Did I just write consistently? :-) That's because the current situation is not exactly consistent, see chapter about Gitolite config ( https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/git.html#git-configuring-gitolite ), which presumes you already generated an RSA key pair for authentication.

3. By the way: what if the reader skipped the SSH keys chapter entirely (not interested), and read forward to the git chapters, which presume that she already configured public key authentication, so there's a ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file in existence to be copied? There should be a sentence about prerequisites in the gitolite chapter, preferably with a link reference back to the SSH keys chapter.

4. The SSH keys chapter correctly describes how to configure SSH authentication and it also works if I primarily use the ssh CLI tool to log in to the server, which is great. But as I see, a big chunk of the world uses PuTTY for SSH connections, which, for some reason, won't be able to use the key pair generated by ssh-keygen for public key authentication. This can be fixed of course (google: ubuntu putty unable to use key file openssh ssh2 private key), but why not give a hint or two to the reader?

[Ian Nicholson (imnichol)]

Good news: I've got a fix.
Bad news: bzr is a royal pain and I don't know how to get it linked to this bug.

[Awal Garg (awalgarg)]

The dsa thing is still present at https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/openssh-server.html :/ This really needs to be fixed soon.