On 4/29/06, Alain Knaff <alain@knaff.lu> wrote:

kochi wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to ssh passwordless from a local to a remote machine (both
> debian).
>
> On the local machine I've generated a key and copied it to the remote
> machine:
>
> local#ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048
> local#scp id_rsa.pub remote.machine:/blabla
>
> On the remote machine I have added the key to .ssh/authorized_keys:
>
> remote#cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
>
>
> Now if I try to ssh the remote machine I'm still asked to enter the
> passphrase ...
>
> local# ssh remote.machine
> Enter passphrase for key '/root/.ssh/id_rsa':
>
>
> Have I missed something ?

Maybe the permissions. On some distributions (Fedora, don't know about
Debian), the umask is set such that by default any files created are
group writable. However, if the authorized keys file is group writable,
sshd disregards it for security reasons.

To fix this, chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys

Moreover, it is advisable to use DSA instead of RSA (DSA is a more
secure cipher than RSA, and some versions of sshd might actually
disallow RSA for that reason...)

ssh-keygen -t dsa

...

cat id_dsa.pub >>.ssh/authorized_keys2

chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys2

>
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> yours,
> kochi

Regards,

Alain