Linux – Setting up a machine to use a key over SSH

linuxsshUbuntu

I am trying to set up a key between my Ubuntu machine and my web server so that I can SSH into it without needing to type a password each time.

I have followed the tutorial found here – http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~ranga/notes/ssh_nopass.html – to the letter.

Whilst everything seemed to work, when I try to SSH into the server the next time it still prompts me for a password.

My first question is that the reason I am doing this is so I can SSH onto a specific site on my server, so I set this all up on the server using the username associated with the site (in this case tosbourn) is this right or should I have used root on the server?

The second question is that because on my machine my username is different (it is toby) I think this could stop it from working? Am I correct in this assumption or should this not matter?

As it stands the home directories on both my local machine and server have .ssh in them and I have copied accross the required file and renamed it to authorized_keys (and keys2)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

One thing to check is permissions on the key file on the server. I have found in the past that sshd will not use the authorised_keys file unless the permissions are greatly restricted.

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

ought to do it.

BTW, I'm using keys generated by PuTTY to access a Linux (Slackware) server and all is well.

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