[Techtalk] Help with SSH private/public key pair

[Mary Gardiner]

Hi,

I've generated a private/public key pair for use with ssh, using the
ssh-keygen program. The output informed me it was an RSA1 type key.

I have placed the public key from ~/.ssh/identity.pub in
~/.ssh/authorized_keys on two remote hosts. This should mean that I am
prompted for my key passphrase when sshing to these machines (as has
worked for about the last two years I've been using ssh), but instead I
am still being asked for my password.

The version according to ssh -V is:
OpenSSH_2.9p2, SSH protocols 1.5/2.0, OpenSSL 0x0090602f

The system is a Debian testing (woody) system - apt reports the ssh
version as:
Package: ssh
Architecture: i386
Source: openssh
Version: 1:1.2.3-9.3

The output of ssh -v originally showed:
debug1: authentications that can continue: publickey,password
debug1: next auth method to try is publickey
debug1: try privkey: /home/mary/.ssh/id_rsa
debug1: try privkey: /home/mary/.ssh/id_dsa
debug1: next auth method to try is password
mary at hostname's password: 

I tried making a symbolic link to /home/mary/.ssh/id_rsa to
/home/mary/.ssh/identity which contains the private key, but then the
output is:
debug1: authentications that can continue: publickey,password
debug1: next auth method to try is publickey
debug1: try privkey: /home/mary/.ssh/id_dsa
debug1: next auth method to try is password
mary at hostname's password: 

What's up?

-Mary.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>