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.