On Sat, 2005-12-10 at 10:13 -0800, Todd Cary wrote:
Jim - I have read the man pages, and with my lack of experience, they are not that clear. Do you have another reference to suggest?
Yeah, public key authentication can seem to use a number of concepts and terms that seem daunting at first. But after just a little practice, they become second nature.
In a nutshell (uber-simplified): 1) You generate a key pair on the client -- a public and private 2) You copy the public key to the server
The next time you login to the server, the server "challenges" your client using the public key, of which, only the client has the private key to decrypt the challenge and respond correctly (again, mega oversimplification here).
You do #1 on the client with: ssh-keygen -t dsa (enter twice for no passphrase)
You do #2 with something like: scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@server:.ssh/authorized_keys
[ NOTE: When you run scp that time, you _will_ be prompted for your password. That's the last time you should ever be though. ]
Now that should be it. You should be able to ssh without being prompted for a password. If you are still prompted, check the /var/log/messages files on both the client and server for any errors/issues.
I can get more geeky if you have follow-up questions.