"sshd_keygen: key_load_public: invalid format" on a fresh image

[David Resnick]

4 out of 5 images I just deployed won't let me login with the ssh key I set in a cloud-config file.

The key used is the same for all images; this is something I've done successfully many times before.

The log has "sshd_keygen[501]: key_load_public: invalid format" 3 times followed by sshd with the same failure. The 8 files matching /etc/ssh/ssh_host* are all zero length.

CoreOS 717.1.0 deployed on VMware vCloud Air.

Any ideas on what's going on here? Any way to salvage the deployed images, or to prevent this from happening again?

- David

[Michael Marineau]

I've genenerally only seen this when killing a VM shortly after boot,
after the new key files have been created but before their contents
actually get flushed to disk. Was the first boot of all these
instances clean? If no failure of the VM was involved I'm not yet sure
how this would happen.

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[David Resnick]

Your explanation makes sense, the VMs were created with a script which cycles the power 25 seconds after creation. I'll increase the time.

Thanks for your help!

- David

[Michael Marineau]

I would highly recommend using a graceful shutdown instead. ext4 may
be relatively robust against improper shutdown but it isn't magic :)