I am trying to learn this instead of just following guides so I can recommend proper actions when people do ask (and they do). Here is what I got down.

First, generate both key with command such as this:

ssh-keygen -b 2048 -t rsa -C comment -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Then you push the public part of the key into authorized_keys2 file

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

(and then chmod it to 600 or similar)

And you download the private key to your computer (id_rsa) and feed that in to Putty to be read and authenticate.

Are these the correct steps to setting this public/private key authentication for passwordless login to SSH?