Here is the how to setup a public key for ssh authentication. so you don’t have to login using root and keep the system secure. The other advantages (which I needed most) are you can run automated maintenance tasks\/checks on other machines including rsync over ssh like I did.<\/p>\n
Ok. Let’s begin.<\/p>\n
1. Create the private and public keys :
\n{code}ssh-keygen -t dsa{\/code}
\nYou will be prompted for a key location, the default is fine so just press enter. Then you are asked to enter a passphrase. From man ssh-keygen :<\/p>\n
\nThe program also asks for a passphrase. The passphrase may be empty to indicate no passphrase (host keys must have an empty passphrase), or it may be a string of arbitrary length. A passphrase is similar to a password, except it can be a phrase with a series of words, punctuation, numbers, whitespace, or any string of characters you want. Good passphrases are 10-30 characters long, are not simple sentences or otherwise easily guessable (English prose has only 1-2 bits of entropy per character, and provides very bad passphrases), and contain a mix of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and non alphanumeric characters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
If you are intending to set up automated tasks that will use this key it is probably best not to supply a passphrase although it will inevitably be less secure.<\/p>\n
2. Copy the public key to the server (you will need to enter the password) : <\/strong>
\n{code}cat ~\/.ssh\/id_dsa.pub | ssh user@server “cat – >> ~\/.ssh\/authorized_keys”{\/code}
\nThe public key you have just created is piped to ssh and store them as authorized_keys. Please remember that if you have PermitRootLogin without-password<\/em> setting in sshd_config, you must disable it first to store that public key. You can set back to without-password again after the public key were copied.<\/p>\n3. That’s it, to test it just ssh to the other server and you shouldn’t need a password. If you entered a passphrase then you need will need to enter it when prompted:
\n{code}ssh user@server{\/code}<\/p>\nNow how about ssh-agent ?<\/p>\n
Using ssh-agent to store passphrases<\/strong>
\nIf you decided to use a passphrase then you need only enter it once per session using ssh-agent and ssh-add.
\n1) The parent shell process in which you work should be started by ssh-agent – ie:
\nssh-agent \/bin\/bash<\/strong>
\n2) Then to store your passphrase for that session run:
\nssh-add<\/strong>
\nEnter your passphrase when prompted
\n3) Thats it, to test it just ssh to the other server and you shouldn’t need a password or passphrase:
\nssh user@server<\/strong><\/p>\nIf you use a desktop environment or window manager you can start it in the same way as a the bash shell was above with ssh-agent so that any child processes (terminals etc) also have access to your passphrase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here is the how to setup a public key for ssh authentication. so you don’t have to login using root and keep the system secure. The other advantages (which I needed most) are you can run automated maintenance tasks\/checks on other machines including rsync over ssh like I did. Ok. Let’s begin. 1. Create the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[121,185,201,227],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfdesignnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfdesignnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfdesignnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfdesignnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfdesignnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfdesignnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfdesignnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfdesignnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfdesignnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}