Hi, I am just migrating to Centos from fedora core 3. I have 3 boxes involved here: Box A --Fedora 3 (doing the dns, http, sendmail serving duties) Box B --CentOS Box C --CentOS I used to run root passwordless ssh both ways from boxes A and B mainly set up to keep the 2 boxes in sync w/rsync ... these 2 boxes normally ran one being the slave and the other being the master...the master did all the serving duties...if something happened where the master couldn't do it anymore, then the slave becomes master. I have tried and tried the following #ssh-keygen -t dsa (and rsa using authorized_keys(2) or both depending...) when it asks for passphrase...just enter and enter # scp /root/.ssh/id_dsa.pub boxA:/root/.ssh/ # ssh boxB #<password> boxbshell # cat /root/.ssh/id_dsa.pub >>/root/.ssh/authorized_key or key2 or both. # exit boxashell # ssh boxb <password> will NOT let me do passwordless now then I have gotten it to work by using the following /root/.ssh/.config : Host remotehost User remoteuser Compression yes Protocol 2 RSAAuthentication yes StrictHostKeyChecking no ForwardAgent yes ForwardX11 yes IdentityFile /home/localuser/.ssh/id_remotehost_dsa taken from: http://www.davz.net/static/howto/sshkeys I can get it to work from 2 boxes both ways...but when I set up the 3rd box, it works but one of the other boxes that was good does not do it anymore. I go back edit the authorized_key files.... check the other boxes make sure they still work set up the faulty box again...get it working then one of the other good boxes doesn't work I then start looking into the .config file...has some pretty dangerous things in it that I really don't care for but that's where I am right now. does anyone know of anything specific that Centos is doing here? or what can be my problem? BTW I am NOT using selinux only as a warn thx John Rose -- ...and I woke up 2 days later in the back yard talking to Elvis!