Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Password-Free SSH

One quick tip on getting password-free SSH working: make sure the permissions are correct on your directories. Otherwise, SSH will fallback to prompting you for a password without telling you why.

Today I was trying to set up password-free root ssh access to my Western Digital MyBook external hard drive. Infuriatingly, it kept prompting me for a password... until I found this site containing the key missing step: I had the wrong permissions on my root user's home directory!

So on the box that you are trying to remote into, run these commands to set up the correct file permissions for ssh:
chmod 700 ~
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys 

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