Linux Administration Cookbook

Additional flags

When we generated our keys, we also added a couple of flags.

As with any software, checking the manual page for the command you're running can provide a sometimes overwhelming amount of additional detail:

$ man ssh-keygen

To save a little bit of a headache, I'm going to highlight some options that may be of interest to you, starting with -b:

-b bits

We used the -b flag to specify a large amount of bits during the generation of our RSA key. The minimum is 1024 and the default is 2048. Your place of business may have requirements on the length of RSA keys.

Next, we have the comment flag:

-C comment

We used this to add a bit of description to our keys. It might be useful if you use different keys for different things (this is ...