The Lair

Remember that whole fuss about public key cryptography? The premise is really simple. What it means for most of us is – never type in an ssh password again, your public/private keys should seamlessly handle all the nasty security bits. So, today – I found myself wanting to do something like that described here.

Simple right? I had a private key generated which I used for code I write in my spare time. Now I needed another private key. Yes, another one – because a few people reading commit logs at a very serious bzns organization might wonder who the hell drac is – and why his commits are appearing in their top-secret git repository.

Generate another private key. Simple.

ssh-keygen -t rsa


Mail the just-generated public key off to the guy setting up the repository and all is well. Except it wasn’t. Because I find that multiple invocations of ssh-keygen generate the same public/private keypair. Yup, generate a keypair for drac AT this domain. Invoke ssh-keygen again, fully expecting a different pair of keys to be created for [real name]. Umm. No. Same key.

I don’t know yet if this is a bug, or expected behaviour for ssh-keygen. Or if it is merely a quirk/bug of the ssh-keygen bundled with msysgit. In any case, I was surprised.

And if none of that made any sense to you folks, never mind. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how I did some git ninja work. Do turn up, won’t you?

yes, wonkey = one key. I’m feeling particularly creative today