Re: Moving private SSH keys to new machine?

From: General Schvantzkoph (schvantzkoph_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 03/09/05 

Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 19:08:46 -0500

On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 12:14:41 -0600, John Reese wrote:

> I realize now that my message was pretty vague. Apologies.
>
> We are bringing a new production server on-line. There are hundreds of SSH
> clients with a public key to the old machine; our goal is to move the keys
> from the old server to the new one in a manner that is acceptable to the
> holders of the public keys.
>
> I have tried the crude method -- I have moved *all* the old keys to the
> new server with the same IP as the old server -- but the clients still are
> refusing to log on, generating a man-in-the-middle warning.
>
> Any idea how we can get past this?
>
> John Reese
>
> On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 16:07:29 +0000, Jem Berkes wrote:
>
>>> Can private SSH keys be moved to a different computer?
>>
>> Assuming you're using OpenSSH, yes. Just copy the appropriate files over
>> (ssh_host* under etc/ssh)

All you have to do is copy over the authorized_keys file. I use a central
file under /etc/ssh/authorized_keys which I copy to all of my machines. If
you are using per user files under ~/.ssh/ then you will have to copy the
files in to ~/.ssh/ on the new machine. Either way it's easy.

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