Generate .pem file from .ppk file

 Introduction

I recently came across a requirement from our DBA Team wherein they needed to access a server on Oracle Cloud and all they had was a .ppk file received from the App Team that managed the OCI server. Since the source server from which we had to connect did not have a GUI, we needed to generate a corresponding .pem file to use on the command line.

For this, I installed putty on a lab machine.

yum install putty

 I then used the .ppk file to generate a .pem file using the following command:

puttygen oci.ppk -O private-openssh -o oci.pem

This step did prompt me for the passphrase for the .ppk file which I was are of.

To login to the OCI server, I used .pem file by specifying the -i option with the ssh command as follows.

-bash-4.1$ ssh -i oci.pem opc@11.59.17.209

Enter passphrase for key 'oci.pem':

Last login: Thu Aug 13 07:17:30 UTC 2020 from 10.22.88.26 on pts/0

Last login: Thu Aug 13 07:18:17 2020 from 10.22.88.26

The passphrase was the same one I was prompted for while generating the .pem file.

Conclusion

This concludes this post on how to generate a .pem file from a .ppk file. I hope you found the post to be useful.