Error: "permission denied"

There are many possible causes for “permission denied” errors, which have to be eliminated one by one. These are covered in the sections below. If at the end, the error still persists, you will need to start a support ticket. If possible, you should first collect verbose output from your ssh client if possible (use the -v option for OpenSSH) and include that in the support ticket. See the Start Here page for where to send your support ticket.

Check that Your Username Is Correct

It is critical that your client pass the right username. This can be specified in your .ssh/config file for clients that support it like OpenSSH (see the Configuring SSH page for more information). Other clients, like PuTTY, need it specified in their own configuration formats/dialogs. Or you can specify it manually to some clients, like most command line clients (includes OpenSSH) when specifying the host. The common format is USERNAME@HOST.

The question then is, what is the correct username to use. That depends on how your user account works. The subsections below handle each case

Member of a Project from the Project Portal

Projects in the new Project Portal give a project-specific username to each member. You must use the project-specific username for the particular project you are working on, which was sent to you by an email notification when you were added to the project and can also be gotten by using the Project Portal. These usernames tend to have the form uXXXXX where each X is a digit. They use the same SSH key as your Academic Cloud/ID account (see the Uploading SSH Keys).

Legacy NHR/HLRN Users (before Project Portal)

Use username you received when you applied for your NHR/HLRN account. Note that if your project has migrated to the Project Portal and your legacy account has been removed from it in favor of a new project-specific username, you must use that instead.

SCC Users before Project Portal

You need to log into the Academic Cloud and get your username. Follow the first few steps on the Upload SSH Key -> Academic Cloud Upload page and get the username listed under account information.

Check that SSH is Using the Right SSH Key

First, check that the SSH key you are giving to your SSH client is the same one you uploaded for your account. The public key should match what you uploaded. See Upload SSH Key for more information. In particular, if you used a document editor for copying your SSH key before pasting it in, you might have to re-upload it but use a plain text editor to do the copying (document editors add formatting characters sometimes).

Make sure the right key is referenced in your .ssh/config file if your client uses it (OpenSSH and many others, but not PuTTY). See Configuring SSH for more information. You can also tell the OpenSSH client which key to use on the command line with the -i KEY argument where KEY is the path to your key.

SCC Users: Check that you can login to a jumphost

Whether you can do this or not is a very useful diagnostic. The jumphosts don’t require HPC access to be enabled and are not part of the HPC (different problems, hopefully). For them, even if you have a project-specific username, you should use the primary username you would find if you follow the first few steps on the Upload SSH Key -> Academic Cloud Upload page and get the username listed under account information.

SCC Users before Project Portal Must Request Access

If you are an SCC user who has not been added to a project in the new Project Portal, you must request HPC access be enabled for your account if you have not previously done so. Start a support ticket by sending an email to hpc-support@gwdg.de. Don’t forget to include your username in the email. See Account Activation for more information.

SCC Users using the jumphosts

With the jumphosts, it is critical that you setup your client to use them as jumphosts. SSH-ing manually into a jumphost and then trying to SSH into a login node will not work as your private key is not on the jumphost itself (and shouldn’t be). See Configuring SSH and Logging In for more information on the jumphost configuration.