How to get freeSSHd public key authentication to work

I was looking for a Windows SSH server implementation to use in conjunction with Mercurial when I stumbled upon freeSSHd. Setting it up was a matter of minutes… except that I could not get public key authentication to work. After countless attempts and many a Google search I eventually solved my problem, thanks to this step by step IBM tutorial.

Unfortunately when used in non-interactive mode freeSSHd doesn’t spawn cmd.exe, which makes it unsuitable for applications that expect their remote counterparts to be on the path.

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This entry was posted on March 28, 2011 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Computing, SCM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “How to get freeSSHd public key authentication to work”

mikemurko Says:
December 20, 2011 at 1:26 am | Reply
Fantastic thanks for the help! For me the trick was that the filename of the public key needs to be exactly = to the username for that key (with no file extension). I was used to using keys ending in “.pub”.
Live Says:
January 21, 2012 at 2:06 pm | Reply
Still not working for me says

Server refused public-key signature despite accepting key!