password-less ssh logins
Log in to a RHEL3 Linux box. In your home dir, if you have a .ssh dir, back it up to some other dir name. (ssh-original, or whatever you like):
mv .ssh ssh-original
Generate the rsa keypair, but don’t create a passphrase (press enter when prompted for one):
ssh-keygen -t rsa
Copy your public key to your authorized_keys:
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
In addition, generating a rsa version 1 keypair will allow you to access most all other hosts not running Open-SSH: (Protocols v1.2, v1.3, etc)
ssh-keygen -t rsa1
…and then, cat .ssh/identity.pub (append) to .ssh/authorized_keys:
cat ~/.ssh/identity.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Perms are important for this to work. Check that your .ssh dir is mode 755:
chmod 755 .ssh/
Also, we found that your home dir cannot be group or world writeable. Mine looks like this:
drwxr-xr-x 130 jloconne genusers 23K Sep 14 09:58 /accts/jloconne/
ssh into whatever you want. The first time you encounter a machine you’ll be prompted to save its key into you .ssh/authorized_hosts file. After that you’ll never be prompted again.