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SSH Keys Howto Quicky

October 11th, 2007 Posted in HOWTO

Toss this little shell script in your bin dir and you can quickly create and setup ssh keys between your client and server. I called it sshkeys.sh but you can name it what you want.

#!/bin/bash

KEY_PRIVATE="$HOME/.ssh/id_dsa"
KEY_PUBLIC="${KEY_PRIVATE}.pub"

if [ "$1" == "" ] ; then
   echo "Usage: $0 <[user@]server>"
   exit
fi

if [ ! -f "${KEY_PRIVATE}" ] ; then
   echo Creating the private and public keys.
   ssh-keygen -t dsa -f "${KEY_PRIVATE}" -N ''
fi

if [ -f "${KEY_PUBLIC}" ] ; then
   cat "${KEY_PUBLIC}" |
   ssh "${1}" "mkdir -p ~/.ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys2 ; chmod -R go-rwx ~/.ssh"
else
   echo Unable to find "${KEY_PUBLIC}"
fi

Run this, enter your pass once, and then you’re free to ssh without entering a password.

Watch for line wraps in your browser, especially the ssh line.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 10:39 am and is filed under HOWTO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “SSH Keys Howto Quicky”

  1. Dr Jan Says:

    October 15th, 2007 at 3:40 am

    Thanks for the nifty script :-)

    When setting this up previously I’ve found that I had to reset the permissions on both the .ssh directory (600) and the user’s home directory (755) before I could login without passwords.


  2. Anton Says:

    October 16th, 2007 at 7:57 am

    The home directory shouldn’t matter, but it’s important that on the remote system the public key not be writable by anyone but you.

    I’ve updated the script above to add a chmod just to ensure it’s all setup right.

    It’s probably overkill since most systems I tested allowed the public key to be read by anyone, just not writable.


  3. Tech Messages | 2007-10-17 | Slaptijack Says:

    October 17th, 2007 at 6:31 pm

    [...] anton – SSH Keys Howto Quicky at antonolsen.comHere’s a quick script to help automate SSH key creation. [...]


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