Okay, in PeopleTools 8.53 you can now specify a digital certificate for SSH, not sure if this was there in 8.52, but in the past I would put the SSH keys (private and public) out in the sshkeys folders of the application server and reference them in the URL properties for SFTP configurations.

Well, you can now store these in the digital certificates area and just reference it using the alias key.  In order to make this work you need to generate an ssh key pair.  On a Redhat system you should be able to run:

ssh-keygen

Just follow the prompts.  You will need to have the openssl rpm’s installed.  This should generate and id_rsa and id_rsa.pub file in the users home directory under the .ssh directory.  You will want to append the id_rsa.pub key to the authorized_keys file (create it if it does not exist).

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

chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

You should be able to check you key by issuing the following:

openssl rsa -in ~/.ssh/id_rsa -check

Now here comes the trick, if you try to copy the public and private key from the SSH window on a windows machine and paste it into the digital store, I found that this would cause the certificate to fail.  I had to sftp the private and public key to my local machine and use my trusty UltraEdit to open the files in unix mode and copy and paste the contents into the digital certificates windows.  It appears that when copying in windows mode it uses the CR/LF versus if you have it in Linux mode it will just have the LF.  This appears to make a big difference.  No errors either way except it just won’t work with the windows format.

NOTE:  If you are copying the .ssh directory from one server to another (multiple application servers) make sure that the permissions on this folder are 700.  If you have a separate batch processing server you will want to ensure that it too has the .ssh folder and keys for the assignment user.