I recently changed development machines and needed to setup TortoiseSVN again using SSH, and I ran into a problem where I could only access Subversion if it was the only authorized key. For my host I’m using Site5, but I’m sure this applies more generally than just for Site5. I already have another set of keys working for ssh, and that public key is the first line of my authorized_keys2 file (the ‘2’ is somewhat optional).

My url for svn is something similar to ‘svn+ssh://domainname_svn/trunk’, I verified this just to make sure from a backup I have on another machine. So I knew I was using the right url, but I still wasn’t able to connect. I have pageant running and have both (one for ssh and one specifically for svn) keys loaded.

When I tried to check out a working copy with Tortoise, it would give me a error. When I would change my authorized_keys file on the server to only have the svn key then it worked just fine. Once again I knew the server was setup correctly as I had no problems previously.

What my problem was I had not specified a key under putty. I use putty’s saved sessions to specify a couple of options only for my svn connection. I had not specified anything under Connection -> SSH -> Auth -> Private Key.

Once I filled that in with the correct key then it didn’t matter what keys Pageant had loaded.