NYCPHP Meetup

[David Mintz]

Inside my intranet I have (or had) passwordless SSH keys set up so I could
ssh into the machines I administer with an absolute minimum of pain. I
followed the instructions found on some how-to out there, and it worked
fine for a long time.

Today I replaced a failing drive in one of the machines, the drive that
housed the /home partition. Put in new drive, partitioned it, etc.,
restored data from a tarball. SSH keys stopped working. The drive
replacement event is the only difference between Before and After that I
can think of.

The offending box is called interps1. In my .ssh directory on my desktop,
I have:

[david at mintz ~]$ ls -l .ssh
total 28
-rw-------  1 david david  887 Aug  9 15:18 identity
-rw-------  1 david david  887 Apr  8 14:39 id_rsa
-rw-r--r--  1 david david  240 Apr  8 14:39 id_rsa.pub
-rw-r--r--  1 david david 2762 Jun 30 11:00 known_hosts

The id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files where created with ssh-keygen back in
April. There's another box called interps2 where I have my .ssh with that
very same id_rsa.pub appended to my authorized_keys; passwordless SSH
logins work fine from my desktop to that machine. I can also
passwordlessly SSH into all the other machines to which I've copied my
public key; that is, nothing has changed except with this interps1.

So I started over from scratch with my .ssh directory on interps1, that
is, I appended my id_rsa.pub (from my desktop) to .ssh/authorized_keys (on
interps1) and tried again to ssh. Still I get prompted for password. I
tried it with -v for verbosity and it doesn't seem to tell me anything I
don't already know (i.e., it ain't working).

I tried several other silly things as well but I don't want to bore you
(too much).

All three machines are running Fedora Core 3 and OpenSSH_3.9p1, OpenSSL
0.9.7a

Any ideas what I could be doing wrong?

A million thanks,

---
David Mintz
http://davidmintz.org/