Host On-Demand provides the utility program keytool for generating public-private key pairs. This tool is part of the Java 1.4 JRE and is also distributed with Host On-Demand. You should use keytool to generate keys for configuring a VT Display session for client authentication using a public key.
However, because keytool is a multipurpose utility for managing keys and certificates, you may find it easier to understand generating a public-private key pair by looking first at a less complex tool from the Linux platform called ssh-keygen. (This description is for illustration purposes only. You cannot use ssh-keygen to generate public-private key pairs for Host On-Demand.)
Here is an example of invoking ssh-keygen from a Linux console:
ssh-keygen -t dsa -f johnkey02.id_dsa -N johnpass
The parameters have the following significance:
-t dsa specifies the type of key to generate (DSA).
-f johnkey02.id_dsa specifies name of the file
that ssh-keygen is to create to hold the private key.
-N johnpass specifies the password for the
private key file.
The invocation above causes the following files to be
created in the local directory. This is how the files
could appear if you issued an ls -l command
from the Linux console:
-rw------- 1 mytmp mytmp 736 Sep 21 17:50 johnkey02.id_dsa -rw-r--r-- 1 mytmp mytmp 625 Sep 21 17:50 johnkey02.id_dsa.pub
The file johnkey02.id_dsa contains the private key.
johnpass.
The file johnkey02.id_dsa.pub contains the public key.
Notice that the name of this file is created
by appending .pub to the name of
the file containing the private key.