Centos – Passwordless SSH (Windows –> CentOS)

centosssh

I am trying to get passwordless SSH authentication to work from a Windows 7 machine to local server.

Windows machine: My login name in this machine is MY_LOGIN_NAME. I am using Cygwin as the command line.
CentOS 5.5 Server: I have admin privileges on this server; logged in as root.

Here is what I have done so far:

Logged into MY_LOGIN_NAME on the Windows machine, I ssh-config-usered from the Cygwin command line. This created (at least) RSA public and private keys in C:/Users/MY_LOGIN_NAME/.ssh
I copied the public key over to the server to the .ssh directory using scp.

scp id-rsa.pub root@xxx.xxx.xx.xx:.ssh/id-rsa.pub
Then I tried to log into the server using ssh like so:

ssh -i id_rsa root@xxx.xxx.xx.xx

But it still asks me for my password. What am I missing?

Best Answer

The problem is your step 2. You overwrote root@xxx.xxx.xx.xx public key with your Cygwin public key. That's not what you want.

You should, instead, add your public key to root@xxx.xxx.xx.xx authorized keys. This can be done manually appending your id-rsa.pub to /root/.ssh/autorized_keys (on CentOS), or automagically running ssh-copy-id on Cygwin.

ssh-copy-id root@xxx.xxx.xx.xx

It will prompt for your password and then you should be fine.

Also, you should recover root@xxx.xxx.xx.xx public key, or generate a new pair, if it's not inconvenient.

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I've seen this happen when the user's home directory isn't local, but on an NFS automount on the network. If your home directory isn't already mounted when sshd goes to look for your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, it won't be able to access it in time, so public-key-based authentication will fail.

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You should check if you have (sshd_config) :

RSAAuthentication yes
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UsePAM yes  <-- That one is usually the last line of the sshd_config

Then that your public key is added to authorized_keys in your ~/.ssh/. The last one (UsePAM yes) is very important, since if disabled it will force you to authenticate with your unix account. PAM is here to say that private key authentication is sufficient to log in. Eventually, if that still don't resolves you may have to check the PAM configuration.

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