[ILUG] openssh

[Wesley Darlington]

Howdy,

On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 05:39:52PM +0000, John P . Looney wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 05:37:03PM +0000, Stephen Shirley mentioned:
> > It doesn't make any difference. To do rsa authentication, you need to have
> > your key held by an agent. All that means is that when prompted for your
> > password by the agent you can just hit return. You should setup the agent
> > to run when you log into your local machine.
> 
>  But...but...I had SSH setup to not ask for a password before. And it
> worked. And there was no agent. And I don't want to use an agent, as it's
> on a pair of backend servers that no one is supposed to login to.

Every six months or so, I find myself in need of exactly this. And every
time, I find myself banging my head against this exact same brick wall
for a couple of minutes. :-)

Things like file permissions, directory permissions, what sshd_config say
and so on and so forth seem to conspire to bite me. And I seem to always
forget to run "ssh -v" *first*. Like, Duh! :-)

Anyway, .shosts files are (IMHO) more trouble than just RSA (or DSA?)
authentication. Plus, I don't entirely trust 'em... I find it best to
just ssh-keygen a keypair without a passphrase, stick it on the remote
box in an appropriate authorized_keys, make sure everything is og-rwx
over there, take a quick gander at the remote box's sshd_config file
and give it a whirl. Then I doctor the remote authorized_keys file to
only accept that passphrase from this machine.

I also find that ssh autologin problems *hate* being ignored. If you
ignore them, even for just a few minutes, they get bored and go away. *grin*

ATB,
Wesley.