From: Luis Lavena <luislavena@...>
Date: 2008-04-16T07:25:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Windows, Net::SSH: how do I use a private key (w / password)

On Apr 15, 6:45 pm, James Dinkel <jdin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Private key authentication works with this user, I know because I use it
> fine with Putty.
>
> Here is my script right now:
> ------------
> require 'rubygems'
> require 'net/ssh'
>
> Net::SSH.start( 'files02', 'myuser', 'mypassword' ) do |session|
>   session.open_channel do |channel|
>     channel.on_data do |ch, data|
>       puts data
>     end
>
>     channel.exec "echo \"hello\""
>
>   end
>
>   session.loop
> end
> -------------
>
> and it works, but I would prefer it to use a private key for the
> authentication and then prompt for the key's password.  In the
> documentation it says it will automatically look for a key in certain
> places, but the places are unix paths and this needs to run from a
> Windows (XP) box.

You will need a few things:

Pageant (from PuTTY) is like a ssh keyring that hold all your private
keys. Also, you need to create a PuTTY session with the same name of
your server (files02) and put into Connection -> Data the username
you're using to log into the server.

That's what I'm using with capistrano and other Net::SSH things that I
cannot disclose, and worked without issues.

HTH,
--
Luis Lavena