two different attempts to generate a keypair (for SSH access) online failed because the keyphrase I used wasn't accepted by either ssh-add or puttygen. I strongly suspect not all characters in my very strong passphrase were acceptable but the error message didn't say what was wrong. Finally I generated a keypair locally with ssh-keygen and took great care to create a passsphrase without 'special' characters that might be misinterpreted at the commandline. Nowe ssh-add and putty-gen worked. #phew! all new stuff for me #learnsomethingneweveryday :-)