Quick tip: connecting to a key restricted server with Nautilus

Nautilus, the file browser of GNOME is capable to connect to remote servers through the SCP protocol. Press Ugrás > Hely megadása (Ctrl+L), and you can type in the user and URL right away. This works flawlessly up until the remote server is protected with a password, or the private SSH key has the default name on our machine (id_rsa). This functionality will break as soon as the private key has a different filename.

It does not matter whether we load up the proper key into ssh-agent, Nautilus will give up the connecting with the following general error message:

„Oops! Something went wrong.” But what exactly, that is up to the user to find out.

The problem simply is that Nautilus does not even offer us which private key to use for the connection. But we can specifiy that in the ~/.ssh/config file, just like this:

Host remote-machine
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/remote-machine_rsa

We save the file, load the key into ssh-agent, and the connection will work right away with your key in Nautilus.