# ssh_keygen says I don't exist and wants me to go away

## Dud3!

I've been poking around securing stuff here and there (you can see how confident I am in my knowledge of Linux security) and I'm not sure if this is from something I did or not.

When I try and do this:

```
/usr/bin/ssh-keygen -t dsa 
```

as a regular user I get this:

```
You don't exist, go away!
```

If I do it as root it works fine, but I need a key for my user account.  Right?

Any suggestions on what's doing this?

----------

## Dan

try just 

```
ssh-keygen
```

 1st

there has been reported an issue with 64bit systems being busy and reporting that way.

 *Quote:*   

> Invoking ssh-keygen from the busybox shell on x86_64
> 
> gives the infamous "You don't exist, go away!" error. 
> 
> A strace shows that it's failing on a getpwuid() call.
> ...

 

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## Dud3!

Nope.  Same thing.  I'm running an Athlon XP also, so no 64 bit stuff here.

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## Dan

have you changed your username at all and is your username in /etc/passwd and matching your /home/username dir?

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## Dud3!

Thanks for that, because that reminded me that I changed the permissions on /etc/passwd to 0700.  I changed it back and that fixed it.

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