Intracluster SSH Keys

Creating intracluster keys

Once you're logged into the login node (i.e., klone-login01 or klone.hyak.uw.edu) you'll use this as a host to submit jobs, transfer data, or navigate your environment. However, you may find yourself needing to either submit multi-node (i.e., MPI) jobs or log into a node after you have a job running there to check its progress. For this you need SSH keys set up for intra cluster access. You can generate an SSH key from the login node using the command below.

ssh-keygen -C klone -t rsa -b 2048 -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -q -N ""

This command creates a 2048-bit RSA key with klone in the comment field.

Authorizing the keys

You will also need to add the contents of your public key to the authorized_keys file in your home directory with the following commands:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

This also ensures the authorized_keys file has appropriate permissions.