In case some other lost person stumbles upon this question...
It's a lot of wizardry to me but here's how I got it to work.
1. Generate a public key from private key with:
ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/myserver.com-rsa -y -P old_passphrase -N
new_passphrase > ~/.ssh/myserver.com-rsa.pub
2.
My auth code works for a public keyfile on my local servers but I can't get it
to work with a private key.
***Here's an ssh debug list when I login at the console (not twisted):
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Try