Help with ssh public key/private key authorization

[simbalala]

I got fed up having to put in my password every time I log into my servers. I have a hot key but it’s still annoying.

So I’m trying public key/private key authorization. At first I used ssh-keygen on my Mac (many times) to generate the keys and copying the public keys to the server into the directory their FAQs specify. Nothing ever happened, I can watch using ssh -vvv.

Then I had the idea of running ssh-keygen on the server and copying the private key to my machine. Whammo, suddenly the server understands the keys exist, it complains if the permissions on my local private keys are set too low, it also prompts for passphrase(s) then accepts them.

As a side note, it must copy them from my user space down to root level because even if I rename the ones in my user space I still get prompted for the passphrases. I was tired of having it prompt for dsa and rsa both so eventually I renamed the rsa private key on my Mac and it stopped prompting for the rsa passphrase.

But… the real problem is that it still doesn’t work, eventually it asks for my password.

I tried putting my ”Mac_machine_name local_user_name” in a .shosts file at my user root level on the server but that seems to have no effect. That’s a suggestion from the ssh man page.

Does anyone have more ideas?

[simbalala]

I got it. I’m not going to post a long winded explanation but if anyone needs to know just post a reply.

Let it be known though that my hosting company’s FAQs suck.