I had an user account set up by my collegue weeks ago, to access our server(rhel). Now Im asked to copy my key so I can login to other servers in the cluster.
My first approach was to copy my /home/user/.ssh folder from the (already set-up) server to the new one. This one obviously fails, I found out with ls -a , that in my .ssh directory is only one file - known_hosts.
Im bit confused from my search results, is it necessary to create a new private-public key pair (I dont have any log about creating in before for the first server, so it was probably already setup for me), or is it sufficient to copy files from the first server and setup owners and permissions?
What you're probably looking for is file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server. If you have your key set up, your public key should be stored there. If there is no such file, than you don't have your keys set up(do you have private keys files on your desktop?).
Please note that for usually ssh will require strict access permissions(rwx for user only) for your ~/.ssh directory and authorized_keys file.
Also you can use as many and as few keys as you wish, depending on your security needs. So using single key pair for multiple servers is possible.