On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 02:42:51PM -0400, Von Landfried wrote:

I am using CentOS 4.5 with OpenSSH_3.9p1 and I am curious if anyone has a solution for this scenario. I have several pub/priv keys that I use for various tasks/reasons. My issue is that I want to have 2 private keys stored in ~/.ssh/ and I am not sure the best way to accomplish that. Currently I am using ssh-agent, and it works fine for manually performing tasks. I was curious if there is a simple way to have multiple private keys stored in the same ~/.ssh/ directory without using ssh-agent? Thanks for reading.

You can name them whatever you want, then add to ~/.ssh/config, at the end:

host * identityfile ~/.ssh/key1 identityfile ~/.ssh/key2

You can also restrict by host instead of a global definition, of course.

On 9/26/07, Von Landfried centos.list@eyestreet.com wrote:

I am using CentOS 4.5 with OpenSSH_3.9p1 and I am curious if anyone has a solution for this scenario. I have several pub/priv keys that I use for various tasks/reasons. My issue is that I want to have 2 private keys stored in ~/.ssh/ and I am not sure the best way to accomplish that. Currently I am using ssh-agent, and it works fine for manually performing tasks. I was curious if there is a simple way to have multiple private keys stored in the same ~/.ssh/ directory without using ssh-agent? Thanks for reading.

You can create a ~/.ssh/config file with host shortcuts that specify specific keys for specific hosts. This would seem to be what you're trying to do. You can also set default usernames for each host in case you don't have common accounts on all boxen.

Sample below:

Host yourbox HostName yourbox.example.com User snuffy IdentifyFile ~/.ssh/some_private_key.rsa

Host someotherbox ....