Cannot ssh into remote machine after rsync

Question

I followed this page on Protecting the Docker daemon Socket with HTTPS to generate ca.pem, server-key.pem, server-cert.pem, key.pem and key-cert.pem

I wanted a remote Docker daemon to use those keys so i used rsync via ssh to send three of the files(ca.pem, server-key.pem and key.pem) to the remote host's home directory. The identity file for ssh into the remote host is called dl-datatest-internal.pem

ubuntu@ip-10-3-1-174:~$ rsync -avz -progress -e "ssh -i dl-datatest-internal.pem" dockerCer/ core@10.3.1.181:~/
sending incremental file list
./
ca.pem
server-cert.pem
server-key.pem

sent 3,410 bytes  received 79 bytes  6,978.00 bytes/sec
total size is 4,242  speedup is 1.22

The remote host stopped recognising the identity file ever since and started asking for a non-existent password.

ubuntu@ip-10-3-1-174:~$ ssh -i dl-datatest-internal.pem core@10.3.1.151
core@10.3.1.151's password: 

Does anyone know why and how to fix it? I still have all the keys if that helps.

Answer 1

There are a couple things about the rsync command that bother me, but, I can't put my finger on the problem (if there is one).

• the rsync command and subsequent ssh command reference different hosts: rsync(core@10.3.1.181:~/ ) and ssh to the host(core@10.3.1.151). Those are different machines, no?

• the ~ in the target of the rsync command. core@10.3.1.181:~/. I am pretty sure that the ~/ references the core home directory, but, you could just get rid of the ~/ and replace that with a . (dot).

If you can reproduce the environment you did the copy in, you can add a --dry-run to the rsync command to see what it is going to do. Looking at this command I can't see it erasing the target's .ssh directory.