Question

How to ssh with i flag

I just finished the tutorial for setting up CentOS on my droplet. Everything works except when I ssh into as a non-root user I have to point to my private key like so ssh user@ip -i ~/.ssh/id_user_rsa or else I get this error: Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic).

My first question is: is this normal?

Second, by the end of the article, ssh access to root is disabled. I used 2 different ssh key pairs for root and my other user. Does this mean I can delete the ssh key pair for root? Is it good practice to have 2 pairs like this?

Show comments

Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Featured on Community

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more