Setting up SSH keys for password less connections for sftp

[Ken Dibble]

from
man ssh

-----
 The file $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys lists the public keys that are per-
     mitted for logging in.


ssh implements the RSA authentication protocol automatically.  The user
     creates his/her RSA key pair by running ssh-keygen(1).  This stores the
     private key in $HOME/.ssh/identity and stores the public key in
     $HOME/.ssh/identity.pub in the user's home directory.  The user should
     then copy the identity.pub to $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys in his/her 
home
directory on the remote machine (the authorized_keys file corresponds to
     the conventional $HOME/.rhosts file, and has one key per line, 
though the
     lines can be very long).  After this, the user can log in without 
giving
     the password. 
-----

My personal opinion is that the last line causes a bit of confusion for 
some users,
as giving a non-null passphrase when  the specified key is generated 
causes the user
to have to enter the passphrase (which can be  interpreted as a request for
the password).

this link may also provide some useful information

http://cricket.ecs.umass.edu/~czou/linux/backupSSH.html


Chris Shehan wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I am attempting to replace an automated ftp process with sftp. This ftp
>process , which runs on a Windows 2000 server, grabs EDI files from our HPUX
>11.0 server every 10 minutes and places then on the EDI Server. I would like
>to modify this process to use sftp and use the SSH keys for password less
>connections ..i.e. public key authentication.
>
>So far I have installed and tested SSH on the HPUX 11.0 server. I have also
>installed cygwin on the Windows 2000 server and preformed a successful test
>using sftp. The next step is to setup the public key authentication so that
>I can use sftp in the automated ftp process.
>
>I have Google'd the net and searched the archives of this list but have not
>been able to find any good documentation that shows me exactly what needs to
>be done in order to get the authentication working in my environment (mix of
>Windows and UNIX). So far I have been able to generate the private and
>public keys for both servers as show below:
>
>HPUX 11.0 - ssh-keygen -t dsa -f hp_sftp_user
>This command create the following files hp_sftp_user & hp_sftp_user.pub
>
>Windows / CYGWIN - ssh -keygen -t dsa -P ""
>This was an interactive session and I was asked for the file names.
>win2k_sftp and win2k_sftp.pub were generated.
>
>** Please let me know if there are better ways to generate the above keys
>..including any additional options I may need.
>
>If the above mentioned keys are workable ... I now need a solution that will
>allow me to put these files to use on both the HPUX and Windows servers so I
>will be able to use password less connections .. which is especially need
>for the scheduled ftp process running on Windows.
>
>Thanks in advance for you help,
>Chris Shehan
>
>  
>


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