SysAdmin's Chronicles

I was asked how to convert a .ppk private key, from a windows putty, to a .pem file used under linux for ssh access.

Putty (windows) can convert beetween the 2 formats, but you can do in under Linux (debian here, but same for many distros)

first of all, check you’ve got putty tools installed,

% puttygen

You got either the puttygen options (then it’s fine), or a message such as “The program ‘puttygen’ is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing: apt-get install putty-tools”

in the later, do as told :

% sudo apt-get install putty-tools

You’re now ready ton convert your key

% puttygen mykey.ppk -O private-openssh -o mykey.pem

-o mykey.pem stands for "output as file mykey.pem"

 

You can now login with openssh, like

% ssh -l myusername -i mykey.pem my.ip.address.or.hostname

Enjoy !

See also:

• ssh debian ppk

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