gcloud: permission denied (public key) when ssh-ing to server

Question

I am trying to set up a new ssh key for a gcloud instance. I followed the instructions here verbatim (https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/adding-removing-ssh-keys), generating a new key, putting the public rsa-ssh key with my username on the SSH Keys section of the Metadata tab in the Google Cloud Platform interface, and setting the appropriate permissions for my public and private keys with chmod.

I am getting an error which ends as follows, when attempting to ss using the -vvv verbose flag:

...

debug1: Next authentication method: publickey debug1: Offering RSA public key: /Users/erickofman/.ssh/salsadb debug3: send_pubkey_test debug3: send packet: type 50 debug2: we sent a publickey packet, wait for reply debug3: receive packet: type 51 debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey debug2: we did not send a packet, disable method debug1: No more authentication methods to try. Permission denied (publickey).

I have (with a co-worker) ensured that my public key is contained within the authorized_keys file in the server's .ssh folder. Thinking that perhaps something was just stale, I also tried restarting the ssh server using service sshd restart to no avail.

I also tried setting up ssh using the gcloud tool, same result.

I have the correct role/permissions for the site from what I can tell.

This is what the log looks like on the server side:

admin@awesome-website:~$ tail /var/log/auth.log Nov 15 20:40:16 awesome-website sshd[18846]: input_userauth_request: invalid user ekofman [preauth] Nov 15 20:40:17 awesome-website sshd[18846]: Connection closed by 10.100.100.10 port 90001 [preauth] Nov 15 20:41:17 awesome-website sshd[18848]: Connection closed by 200.200.20.20 port 90002 [preauth]

Been banging my head on this for a bit, any help much appreciated!

Answer 1

Whelp, turns out that new ssh keys do not get incorporated unless a full instance restart is effected. Not ssh server restart, but a full instance restart (stop gcloud instance, then start gcloud instance). It doesn't say this in the documentation, good to know for future reference.