Ssh – permission denied publickey using rsync with GCP

rsyncsshvirtual-machines

I'm trying to connect with rsync to a GCP vm. Whenever I do, I'm getting weird errors related to permissions.

I've checked that my username is part of the sudoers group so I can't really see where the issue is coming from. I logged in to my GCP instance which created a user dir under /home following my Mac OS username format,

Here are the commands I've been trying, and the results…

C02YT3UDLVDL:proj-name j.lname$ ssh -i ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine    
j.lname@xx.xxx.xxx.xx The authenticity of host 'xx.xxx.xxx.xx (xx.xxx.xxx.xx)' 
can't be established. ECDSA key fingerprint is 
SHA256:JW7VfidHTsAtq8JjF9bEkdfIjdskIAadfs80.Are you sure you want to continue  
connecting (yes/no)? yes Warning: Permanently added 'xx.xxx.xxx.xx' (ECDSA) to 
the list of known hosts.

After which I try moving a test dir… 

rsync -Pavz testDir/* xx.xxx.xxx.xx:/home/j.lname

And get 

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(226) [sender=3.1.2]

Trying it one more time get: 

 $ rsync -Pavz testDir/* xx.xxx.xxx.xx:/home/j.lname/
 The authenticity of host 'xx.xxx.xxx.xx (xx.xxx.xxx.xx)' can't be established.
 ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:Q8kqWi3iyLno3Q8kqWi3iyLno3Q8kqWi3iyLno3.
 ECDSA key fingerprint is MD5:ff:56:c3:21:cc:f1:a7:62:1b:72:bc:54:8e:f7:c8:1a.
 Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
 Warning: Permanently added 'xx.xx.xx.xx' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
 yPermission denied (publickey).

Edited:

At the advice of someone on here also tried 

rsync -Pavz -e "ssh -i ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine" testDir/* 
j.lname@xx.xxx.xxx.xx:/home/j.lname/

And that time got: 

bash: rsync: command not found
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far)   
[sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at 
io.c(226) [sender=3.1.3]

Best Answer

With rsync you have to specify the ssh key as you do with ssh. That's why you get a permission denied. We can do it with the -e option :

rsync -Pavz -e "ssh -i ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine" testDir/* j.lname@xx.xxx.xxx.xx:/home/j.lname

Edit:

Rsync command should be installed on the destination server too

Related Topic