Linux Administration Cookbook

The public and private key files

As hinted at previously, what we've done here is create two files, one half of which can be freely passed around (the public half) and one half of which we keep safe somewhere else (the private half).

By default, these files are located in the home directory of your user, in the hidden .ssh folder:

[vagrant@centos1 ~]$ pwd/home/vagrant[vagrant@centos1 ~]$ ls -a.  ..  .bash_history  .bash_logout  .bash_profile  .bashrc  .ssh[vagrant@centos1 ~]$ ls .sshauthorized_keys  id_ed25519  id_ed25519.pub  id_rsa  id_rsa.pub  known_host

The public halves of our keys end in .pub, and the private halves don't have a file extension.

Let's take a look at each of the four files:

[vagrant@centos1 ~]$ cat .ssh/id_rsa-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE ...