[Trivia] migrating ssh keys windows -> linux

I can almost hear you thinking: 'what is this [Trivia]-thingie, we had labels right?' You are absolutely right! I just wanted to add a more visual tag to posts that contain trivia things. If you see the [Trivia]-thingie you can safely assume that the blog contains a short solution to a random problem. I am writing it down for several reasons:

• I could not find the solution in a quick way


• When I have the same problem I can find out what I did to solve it


• When you have the same problem you can find out what I did to solve it

Enjoy!

I was migrating my SSH-keys from Windows to Linux and found out that my pass phrase was not accepted anymore. The keys would load into Pageant with the same pass phrase, but keychain would not accept the same pass phrase. I found this suggestion, but it would not work. Another suggestion was made here and this lead me to the actual solution.

The key to the solution (pun indented) was that the key generated under windows was not in the OpenSSH format. It is quite easy to convert it to the right format using puttygen and it worked after the conversion.

So if the key that you generated on windows will not accept your pass phrase on linux, convert the key to OpenSSH and try again.