Openssh: renaming keys

[bill-linux]

am using openSSH on Debian Lenny. For years now I've used ssh key create by using

ssh-keygen -t rsa

It offers the default name of id_rsa (which, of course, creates the files id_rsa and id_rsa.pub).

In the past I've always renamed these keys, e.g., id_rsa-SERVERNAME, but this version doesn't appear to work with renamed keys. I tried non-default keys and could not get them to work. I used ssh -v user-at-server to see what was happening: It appears that ssh looks only for id_rsa ... is it possible to rename the keys? I google, but got some answers about ssh-add that didn't seem to work.

Thoughts? Is there something I've missed ... this set me back a couple of hours recently ....

[scathefire]

Are you talking about public-key authentication?

Perhaps you should try:

PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile      .ssh/name-of-your-key

[nmset]

There are many authentication methods with OpenSSH and your post is not much informative.
I understand you want to authenticate using private/public key on a remote server, with the ssh client. You want to use a renamed private key other than id_rsa.

Quoting ssh man pages :

-i -file ... -identity_file
Selects a file from which the identity (private key) for RSA or DSA authentication is read. The default is ~/.ssh/identity for protocol version 1, and ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_dsa for protocol version 2. Identity files may also be specified on a per-host basis in the configuration file. It is possible to have multiple -i options (and multiple identities specified in configuration files).

So you can have much flexibility if you specify the right options in ssh_config.