Set Up Public Key Authentication for SSH on the Mac

Thanks to a great suggestion by Nick Charlton, I decided to put together a screencast demonstrating how to set up public key authentication for logging into SSH servers on the Mac.

Setting up a keypair and then using it to log in to remote systems, instead of remembering separate usernames and passwords, can be a bit of a fiddly business, but I hope that in this screencast I can show how to get it set up.

Set Up Public Key Authentication for SSH on the Mac from Peter Upfold on Vimeo.

Take a look and let me know what you think!

Find this tutorial useful?

5 Comments

1. Lee Findlow wrote:

   This is something which I was trying to figure out a while ago, in order for automated rsync backups. It is essentially quite a simple thing I suppose, although there are so many different tutorials on it I ended up getting quite confused. In the end I got it working in a bodged up way, although one noticeable difference I found was to use the following command:

   scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@server:~/.ssh/authorized_keys
   (From http://forum.slicehost.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=990)

   In order to copy my public key across … but the problem with that is that it will clear out any other keys in there, but great tutorial! Will definitely use it for reference in the future (as I tend to forget these things 😉

   Lee

   Friday, September 11, 2009 at 11:20 | Permalink |
2. jon wrote:

   The scp issue can be solved by using the following commands:

   scp .ssh/id_dsa.pub daniel@linuxtwo:

   …

   cat id_dsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys

   See:

   Howto setup SSH keys between machines

   http://fedoranews.org/dowen/sshkeys/

   Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 18:12 | Permalink |
3. Alan Paterson wrote:

   Great stuff. A very great help – except…

   I need to log on to VMS machines. I DO have on my PC this stuff set up and working (using Pageant and PuTTy) so I know that it should be possible. Following from what you describe here I did try creating the file sys$login:[ssh]authorized_keys with the contents of the public key. But no luck.

   Any suggestions anyone?

   Friday, November 6, 2009 at 09:13 | Permalink |
4. Peter wrote:

   Alan,

   I don’t know anything about VMS or how that might differ from my server in this example (CentOS Linux), but you might try double-checking the permissions on everything to do with the SSH server on that machine. If one thing is slightly differing from the required permissions, logging on via a key will simply fail.

   Friday, November 6, 2009 at 11:47 | Permalink |
5. Michael wrote:

   Peter,

   Thanks for the great tutorial!! Your youtube video helped me out alot.

   Michael

   Saturday, February 27, 2010 at 06:02 | Permalink |