Comments on: How to SSH without password

By: Arpit Pandey

Arpit Pandey — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:00:09 +0000

thanks Vineet. it s really a nice article.
earlier it was not working for me. but when i had given
chmod 700 ~

it is working as intended.

thanks a lot.

By: vineet

vineet — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:03:42 +0000

Make sure the permissions are set correctly, see the end of the article:
chmod 700 .ssh
cd .ssh
chmod 600 authorized_keys

By: Vikash

Vikash — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:31:35 +0000

Hi Vineet,
Nice article. I have got a problem with Openssh on Windows XP.
The steps are same as using keygen to create private and public key, copy public key to another system .ssh folder, append it to authorized keys. restart the opensshd on both system.
Still getting prompt for password.
Please help.

Thanks,
Vikash

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 17:38:03 +0000

Vineet,

I got it working! I had to change a line in the sshd_config file. It wasn’t looking in the correct location for the authorized_keys file. I had “~/.ssh/authorized_keys”, i replaced it with “/home/%u/.ssh/authorized_keys” and it worked. Thank you for your time.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:46:49 +0000

Thanks, i’ll work on those.

By: vineet

vineet — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:37:25 +0000

Rob, I don’t see anything obviously wrong. So let’s try to debug this further…

1) Try the “-v” option on the client side.
ssh -p 2008 “Bad Ass”@XX.XXX.XXX.XX -v

Do you see anything interesting here… if possible can you paste the output.

2) On the server side, see the output in the /var/log/secure file.
tail -f /var/log/secure

Anything interesting there?

3) On the server side, can you take a look at /etc/ssh/ssh_config file. I looked at my file and it is almost empty, with just a few lines:
Host *
GSSAPIAuthentication yes
ForwardX11Trusted yes
SendEnv LANG LC_CTYPE LC_NUMERIC LC_TIME LC_COLLATE LC_MONETARY LC_MESSAGES
SendEnv LC_PAPER LC_NAME LC_ADDRESS LC_TELEPHONE LC_MEASUREMENT
SendEnv LC_IDENTIFICATION LC_ALL

Can you paste the content of yours, especially if you see any interesting lines.

4) On the server side, try running the sshd server in the debug mode. See “man sshd”, the “-d” option:
-d Debug mode. The server sends verbose debug output to the system log, and does not put itself in the background. The server also will not fork and will only process one connection. This option is only intended for debugging for the server. Multiple -d options increase the debugging level. Maximum is 3.

Hope one or more of the above helps.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:22:45 +0000

Any other thoughts for my sanity sake…I’ve been working on this for ever, i just can’t figure out what i did wrong.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:39:50 +0000

1.
ls -al ~/.ssh
drwx—— 2 mobile mobile 170 Nov 6 16:36 ./
drwxr-xr-x 9 mobile mobile 474 Nov 5 11:41 ../
-rw——- 1 mobile mobile 1679 Nov 8 15:26 id_rsa
-rw-r–r– 1 mobile mobile 410 Nov 8 15:26 id_rsa.pub
-rw-r–r– 1 mobile mobile 442 Nov 5 11:42 known_hosts

whoami – mobile

2
Bad Ass

ssh -p 2008 “Bad Ass”@XX.XXX.XXX.XX

By: vineet

vineet — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:24:31 +0000

I didn’t see any obvious issues with the above.

Can you send a few more things:

1) Output of the following, on the client side:
ls -al ~/.ssh

whoami

2) Output of the following, on the server side:
whoami

3) What is the exact ssh command you are using to login? Just trying to confirm if the username on the server side matches correctly?

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:28:59 +0000

1) On the server side:

Bad Ass@ROBSCOMPUTER ~
$ ls -ald ~/
drwx——+ 1 Bad Ass None 0 Nov 9 10:17 /home/Bad Ass/

Bad Ass@ROBSCOMPUTER ~
$ ls -ald ~/.ssh
drwx——+ 1 Bad Ass None 0 Nov 9 09:36 /home/Bad Ass/.ssh

2) On the client side:

ls -ald ~/
drwxr-xr-x 9 mobile mobile 374 Nov 5 11:41 /var/mobile/

ls -ald ~/.ssh
drwx—— 2 mobile mobile 170 Nov 6 16:36 /var/mobile/.ssh/