Fabien Potencier wrote a nice article that I’m going to try out – usernameless and passwordless logon with SSH on Linux systems. This tutorial is especially useful for those with 1and1.co.uk hosting where the username is something like u12345678, which I never bother remembering…
First create the logon key. SSH to the server you wish to set up the connection to using your normal username and password.
chmod 700 ~/.ssh cd ~/.ssh chmod 600 authorized_keys ssh-keygen -t dsa cat id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Then download the id_dsa file to your laptop, using SFTP or similar, move it to something like ~/.ssh/keys/myserver.key and chmod 600 myserver.key. On your laptop, edit ~/.ssh/config and add something like this:
Host myserver
HostName 1.2.3.4
User u12345678
IdentityFile /home/user/.ssh/keys/myserver.key
That should be all there is to it!
