Last week I was lucky enough to have my laptop upgraded (yay SSD) which meant I needed to configure a new install of OSX Lion. Most of my files are stored online (email, documents, code, etc) but I made sure to keep my SSH keys in order to have a smooth transition.

Basically you simply need to make a copy of your id_rsa file, located in ~/.ssh/id_rsa. However, when you copy this to your new install you might run into the following error:

Permissions 0777 for ‘id_rsa’ are too open.

Luckily, it’s really easy to fix – keys need to be only readable by you.

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Happy coding.