ssh with DSA authorization keys; folder permissions and other easy to miss problems

by krisrowland

ssh without passwords is usually easy to do, e.g., using ssh-keygen as per here, but I have come accross some issues a couple of times recently.

1: Make sure the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file is spelled correctly, i.e., don’t spell it “authorised”. Easy to do with Australian or British English.

2: Make sure the .ssh folder and its contents have the correct access permissions. The folder on the remote host I was wanting to connect to didn’t have the correct permissions. A quick chmod -R 755 ~/.ssh did the trick.

Thanks to this Arch Linux forum entry.

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