Hi, On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:57, Tim Nelson<tnelson at rockbochs.com> wrote: > I connect to a very large number of new machines with a handful of my CentOS boxen. Whenever I connect to a new host, I *REALLY* would like to *NOT* see the error message such as this: > The authenticity of host 'w.x.y.z (w.x.y.z)' can't be established. > RSA key fingerprint is 62:7a:6c:e5:03:f5:47:be:23:a5:c5:e5:c3:60:9b:8d. > Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes > Also, some of these systems are being setup with an automated login system via SSH keys which means I have to manually login to each of the boxes before the automated scripting will work just to clear the 'authenticity' error. > Is there a way to disable this error/authenticity check globally for a system? I understand it may not be the best practice in terms of security, but for an internal trusted host, I have no reservations making this change. Yes, You can do it for one session only (which is convenient for a script) like this: $ ssh -q -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no ... If you want to do that permanent, you can add the two last options to /etc/ssh/ssh_config, like this: UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null StrictHostKeyChecking no But I don't think you can get the same as the "-q" does, which suppresses the "Adding key to file..." text on the first login. In any case, I don't think you should do it globally, but do it using the long command line on your script only. I also create a bash alias "qssh" which calls ssh with those options, which is handy when I'm trying to connect to a machine that I know will get reinstalled many times (and thus have its private key changed) and I really don't want to store it in my ~/.ssh/known_hosts. HTH, Filipe