I had my first experience with public key encryption this afternoon. It was not pretty. Our work servers all use SSH. While I’ve had a Unix login for years, I rarely have used it for anything but FTP. Today, I wanted to install something, which meant I needed to use the command line. I’m not a whiz, but I figured I can blunder my way through it… until I realized I didn’t yet have an encyrption key.
Using Putty, I was able to generate a key, save the private key, and then copy the public key for use in the appropriate directory. From there, though, I ran into problems, and I was unable (today) to resolve them. I ended up using vi, the world’s most non-intuitive text editor for those who don’t live on the command line, in an (as yet futile) attempt to put my public key in a file. I’m sure that wasn’t the right way to do it, but since I couldn’t map the network drive and scp the file, I couldn’t think of anything else. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try again — or ask the right person for help.
And to think that someone at work suggested I learn enough Perl to start looking at some log files of interest by myself. In many ways, I may want to be a geek, but I’d like to imagine that I have some time away from the computer (when I’m not typing this kind of rant?). Wish me luck tomorrow.