SSH or bust

Want to avoid typing your password every time you ssh into your remote client? I bet it’s on the top of your priority list. If you’re one of the few, take a look here for a general linux tutorial. And here for a more mac centric one that shows you how to generate a 2048 bit pair.

Basically you generate the key-pair using ssh-keygen (don’t enter a passphrase if you want to connect with no password) . The key generator will put the files in ~/.ssh. Upload identity(.pub) to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and id_dsa.pub to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 on your remote host. Then you should be able to open a secure shell without a password. If you’re connecting from multiple locations, you probably want to concatenate the files onto authorized_keys rather than overwriting them. What works for me, may not work for you, especially if you’re using ssh2.

There are some security issues, because anyone can use ssh from the terminal to connect to the server. But it’s not really a huge issue because they need to be able to get onto the computer in the first place. Then again, I’m not one of the uber-paranoids and save website passwords and such.