Why Git ignores ~/.ssh/id_rsa, wants ~/.ssh/id_dsa or ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa?

Question

This is the error I'm receiving:

no such identity: /home/eduan/.ssh/id_dsa: No such file or directory
no such identity: /home/eduan/.ssh/id_ecdsa: No such file or directory
Permission denied (publickey).

That's what happens when I try to push, or in this case when I do ssh -T [email protected].

I have correctly generated the id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files.

How may I go about solving this? I'm using Arch Linux with E17 BTW.

EDIT:
@kortix would the following work for this?:

Host github.com
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

It doesn't seem to work for me yet... I get the following when I push with Git:

Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

I made sure the repo exists, and I also updated the remote URL with git remote set-url origin [email protected]:Greduan/dotfiles.git.

I also added the SSH key to the list of accepted SSH keys in GitHub. What else should I do?

Answer 1

The SSH client tells you about id_dsa (note the "d" — it stands for DSA) while you've generated id_rsa (note the "r" which stands for RSA).

You should either generate a DSA key or tell SSH which "identity" (the private key) to use. This could be done using the IdentityFile directive under a custom Host entry in your ~/.ssh/config file for the github remote (see the ssh_config(5) manual page).

Update (2013-04-29, to make it clearer for the next reader). The essense of the problem was that the OP has wrong owner (root) on his ~/.ssh/id_rsa key, so the OpenSSH client first tried to read that key, failed, and then went on trying to read ~/.ssh/id_dsa and ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa, in turn, which also failed — this time because they simply did not exist. Having no more keys to use for pubkey authentication and no available authentication mechanisms, the SSH client failed. Those "No such identity ..." messages were actually warnings.