You should be able to create any file or directory, so long as the user you’re logged in as has permissions to do so.
Are you receiving a particular error when trying that?
Also, if you were to to log in as root over SSH, you could always just type “ssh localhost”, and upon logging in again, it will create a .ssh directory for you – then it’s just a matter of creating the authorized_keys file.
Although I can access server at the user level with ssh, I cannot figure out how to access the server through putty at the root level. Putty keeps opening up and asks me for user name and password. Which will get me in, but I have to constantly enter user name and pass. I cant find anything specific to root/putty/ssh on virtualmin with a google search.
root password was set as I was able to use putty to login to root with password. But that was a PITA to enter every time. I hear you on the sudo option. I was aware of that, but it just bugged me that I couldnt login with keys.
I changed the putty ip to root@serverdomain and also had to create /root/.ssh/authorized_keys file with my public key inside the file. Make sure any key is continuous with no carriage returns.
I have two different ip addresses with linode. One is centos 6.5 and the other is my virtualmin with centos 7.0. With the centos 6.5 server putty worked fine with just the ip address. But with the centos 7 server, root@myserverdomain was necessary in order to connect to the server.