cygwin ssh no putty yes?

Question

I generated a keys with putty w/ no passphrase. putty works fine, but now i installed cygwin and would like to use ssh to login. For some reason i'm prompted for a passphrase? why? putty just logs straight in? i don't want to have to generate a new key and piss off the network admins. here is what it looks like in cygwin: $ ssh -i Documents\ and\ Settings/xxxxx/My\ Documents/xxxxx\ putty\ keys/private\ key.ppk dev.xxxxxx.com Enter passphrase for key 'Documents and Settings/xxxxx/My Documents/xxxxx putty keys/private key.ppk': Permission denied (publickey).

Answer 1

Putty uses its own .ppk format for keyfiles, and Cygwin's ssh probably can't read them correctly.

Solution: convert the .ppk file to OpenSSH key format with puttygen.exe.

Answer 2

You need to get "puttygen.exe" from the putty webpage http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html to convert your key to the OpenSSH format. Then it should just work.

Answer 3

If you can login with putty, there is no need to "piss off the network admins". Just generate a new key with cygwin, then login with putty and place your new public key in your .ssh/authorized_keys file. You should now be able to login with cygwin's ssh.

EDIT:

By the way, a sure way to "piss off" any admin is to use unencrypted keys.