Generating and using a SSH-RSA key to login to the Director Management Console?

Products

• Mobility Threat Protection
• Director

Issue/Introduction

How do you generate and use a SSH format private key to login to the Director Management Console (DMC) or through PUTTY into the Director Command line interface (CLI)?

 

Resolution

NOTE:  if you choose the option  SSH-RSA in the DMC, instead of the default SSH-Simple, we require you to use the Open SSH format for the private key .  Putty, however, can work with normal private key, but we cannot use the same formated key with the Web user interface - DMC.

Here are instructions on how to generate a Key using the Putty Key Generator. We then use the Java based DMC to login using this generated key, employing  the SSH- RSA option in the User interface.   In the second section of the article we provide instructions on how to Configure PUTTY to use a private SSH-RSA KEY. As stated above, you cannot use the same key generated in step two, for the java based DMC. In other words, if you only need to use the DMC with this protcol, do not complete step two.

1: SSH-RSA Configuration Setup to use in the java based DMC:

• Open PuTTYGen.

 

 

• Generate Public key by clicking on Generate button and move the mouse over PuTTY Key Generator.

 

 

• Copy the generated public key (select key as shown above fig, and copy that)
• Input the selected key in the Director console using the command- you will need to be in config mode. 
  •  ssh client user admin authorized-key rsakey sshv2 <key you generated above>
    • TIP: See the below notes for a link  to the article on the command line interface of Director.  

 

 

 

• Go to PuTTYGen and provide "Key passphrase" and "Confirm Passphrase"

 

 

 

• Export OpenSSH private key by clicking on Conversions -> Export OpenSSH Key

 

 

 

• Save the Private key
• Now try to use the saved key to login to Director DMC

 

 

 

• Click on Proceed, and you should be successfully authenticated and that will launch the DMC.

  

2: Configuring  PuTTY to use a private  SSH-RSA key :

If you want to login to the Director Command line interface (CLI)  using a  Putty session  that employs a private key encrypted to use SSH-RSA then you don't need to export it to a Open SSH key, as per above.  We require you, however,  to use normal Private key, as shown below.

• Save the Private Key from PuTTYGen by clicking on "Save Private Key" as shown in below fig

 

 

 

• Save private key.
• Use saved key to login to Director using Putty