Once this opened I added the public key, saved by hitting Ctrl + O, enter, and then exiting with Ctrl + X. Below is an example of the public key I put in, I'm wondering if I was supposed to include the entire string?
Yes, you have to include the
entire string.
Usually, after creating your keypair you simply move it to your server (your PI in this case).
This works with this command:
with
PI-USERNAME being your username on the PI and
192.168.56.101 being the IP of your PI.
Afterwards you will be able to authenticate using public key cryptography, without entering your password.
When would I enter that? After the "chmod -R 700 .ssh/" command?
chmod -R 700 .ssh/ (Nothing happened after doing this)
exit
chmod doesn't give you any output
if it succeeds, so don't worry about that. If you did
ls -l before chmod, then again after chmod, you'd notice the file permissions change, which is chmod's purpose.
For example, at the very end it has the nickname I gave the key "LightNode Keys". Should I omit that?
"LightNode Keys" has a space character in it, but you're not using double quotes around the nickname in the example public key string you gave. I'm not saying that's the overall problem, but it's likely
a problem. Avoid putting spaces in anything that's going to get parsed by a command line tool, a space is treated like an indication that a new parameter is after the space from the perspective of parsing commands.
Ok I can try again changing the nickname to just LightNode, but what about the "2048 37" at the beginning of the public key. Will the spaces there also create a problem? Also what are your thoughts on just skipping this step altogether?