Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 12:15:52 -0400 (EDT) From: "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> To: lowell@world.std.com (Lowell Gilbert) Cc: cjclark@home.com, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Using ssh on Multiple Machines Message-ID: <199904091615.MAA08195@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> In-Reply-To: <rd6lng1vqrz.fsf@world.std.com> from Lowell Gilbert at "Apr 9, 99 09:59:12 am"
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Lowell Gilbert wrote,
[snip]
> Just for the record, I think the the ssh man pages are *great.* Very
> clear, and still fairly concise given the huge amount of material they
> cover.
>
> The basic trick is that you create a .ssh/authorized_keys file
> containing the ssh keys you want to accept.
Right, and this is where I find things confusing. From the ssh(1)
manpage,
Ssh implements the RSA authentication protocol automati-
cally. The user creates his/her RSA key pair by running
ssh-keygen(1). This stores the private key in .ssh/iden-
tity and the public key in .ssh/identity.pub in the user's
home directory. The user should then copy the iden-
tity.pub to .ssh/authorized_keys in his/her home directory
on the remote machine (the authorized_keys file corre-
sponds to the conventional .rhosts file, and has one key
per line, though the lines can be very long). After this,
the user can log in without giving the password. RSA
authentication is much more secure than rhosts authentica-
tion.
So, I have taken the 'identity.pub' file, put it on a floppy (or
whatever), and then just do something like 'cat identity.pub >
.ssh/authorized_keys' on a separate machine. Now, above it says,
'after this, the user can log in without giving the password,' but
each time I invoke ssh between these machines I have to enter my
passphrase. Why that happens (and whether it should happene at all) is
not clear to me from the manpage. Since that is a heck of a lot more
work to enter a passprhase than the remote user's password (or more
often I make a typo in the passphrase), I often use the password for
the user instead. Is there a difference? Why would I chose one over
the other? Those are the kinds of things I have trouble with in the
ssh manpages.
--
Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com
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