Trying to remote into server with private key

[Globox19]

Hello everyone,
I'm trying to set up my first ubuntu server so as to be able to SSH into it remotely using a private key.
I have made it generate a private key using

sudo ssh-keygen

Then I assigned this key to my user account (which is a linux admin but not root)

sudo ssh-copy-id [email protected]

I have then tried to edit the sshd file using

sudo nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd config

But there is something a bit strange. In the tutorial I was following (i am very new to command line in Linux) the person was getting a lot of pre-commented code which he just had to un-comment. But for me the file seemed totally blank. I just typed in the lines that the guy was un-commenting :

Port 2222
PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no

Then I restarted the sshd and made my server display the private key :

sudo systemctl restart sshd
sudo cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa

And deleted the private key from the server :

sudo rm ~/.ssh/id_rsa

I saved the private key to a .ppk text file, which I loaded in PuttyGen to be able to use the key conveniently with Putty to SSH into my server.
For some reason I am stuck and cannot successfully SSH into my server remotely though. I am getting this error message from Putty :

Network error : Connection refused

Could you please help me getting this to work?

 

[Globox19]

Finally found out what was wrong : i was writing
sudo nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd config
instead of
sudo nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd_config

 

[CDintoyourdirectories]

Good catch, thanks for sharing. Sounds like something I would run into if I were trying to generate a private key in the CLI.