Configure SSH Key Authentication

Purpose: Sometimes you need two linux computers to be able to talk to eachother without requiring a password. Passwordless SSH can be achieved by running the following commands:

Non-Root Key Storage Considerations

When you generate SSH keys, they will be stored in a specific user's profile, the one currently executing the commands. If you want to have passwordless SSH, you would run the commands from a non-root user (e.g. nicole).

ssh-keygen # (1)
ssh-copy-id -i /home/nicole/.ssh/id_rsa.pub [email protected] # (2)
ssh -i /home/nicole/.ssh/id_rsa [email protected] # (3)
  1. Just leave all of the default options and do not put a password on the SSH key. )
  2. Change the directories to account for your given username, and change the destination to the user@IP corresponding to the remote server. You will be prompted to enter the password once to store the SSH public key on the remote computer.
  3. This command is to validate that everything worked. If the remote user is the same as the local user (e.g. nicole) then you dont need to add the -i /home/nicole/.ssh/id_rsa section to the SSH command.