Bryan - I wish there was a "Simplified Linux Admin" book written with your approach! It worked as advertised, and when I go to the man pages for more detail, I have a beginning place to start...a place that works. This is a writing/learning style that I call "spiral learning": you start with the fundamentals and expand your knowledge from that point as needed. Many thanks! Now I will create the crontab. Todd Bryan J. Smith wrote: > 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 at 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. > > > -- Ariste Software 2200 D Street Ext Petaluma, CA 94952 (707) 773-4523 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20051211/1edce21b/attachment-0004.html>