Deploying OKD (formerly OpenShift Origin) is relatively simple. You just follow the instructions in the git repo Right? Wrong, I spent far too long on a stupid error, it wasn’t even a technical problem, I just didn’t read it properly.

The template deployed ok and all of the VMs and infrastructure looked healthy, but I couldn’t log into any of the VMs via SSH. It just made no sense

I followed almost all of the prerequisite steps, created a resource group, a Key vault, a service principal and stored all of the required data in the Key vault. However I made one fatal mistake. I copied and pasted the private SSH key from my Azure Cloud Shell (Linux container) into my Key vault secret (on a windows machine)can you see where I went wrong? 🙂

What I should have done was run the below command to export the private key into the Key vault directly.

az keyvault secret set --vault-name KeyVaultName -n SecretName --file ~/.ssh/id_rsa'

Once I did this and then redeployed the template, I could log into my machines with no issues.