Fwd: Re: MC ssh login without password

[Anze <anzenews volja net>]

Hi!

First of all, thank you all for the answers, I appreciate it! :)

About security and string plaintext passwords on the computer - yes, that's a 
security risk, but not a big one in my case (single user on the computer). 
Besides, if someone breaks into my computer he can access those servers if he 
knows the password or not - he just needs to steal my private keys, right? 

Anyway, I guess I'll either copy the files to the server or keep on typing the 
passwords (or maybe write them down on the back of the keyboard, heh, 
heh... ;).

Thank you again!

Kind regards,

Anze


On Thursday 11 of September 2008, Frank Dietrich wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Anze <anzenews volja net> wrote:
> > > > Is there a way to automate this login _without_ doing anything
> > > > on the server side? It should be doable, but every site I
> > > > googled talks about keygen and putting the part of the key on
> > > > the server...
> > >
> > > Have you tried to create an ssh-key and login with this key
> > > instead of the password? "man ssh" says how to do this.
> >
> > Could you please be a bit more specific? I do not have much
> > experience in ssh and "man ssh" doesn't really help - it talks about
> > agents, keys,... it's all greek to me. :)
>
> It's not that complicated:
>
> ssh-keygen -b 2048 -f name_for_the_file
>
> -b 2048 -- genreate a secret key with a length of 2048 bit
> -f ...  -- generate the file and file.pub where your private and
>            public keys will be saved
>
> > Let me point out that I'm looking for a solution that would _not_
> > require to put anything on the server (keys and similar). Is this
> > even possible?
>
> May be that's not possible. If you don't use keys there is no way to
> store the password somewhere. For security reasons. If it would be
> possible you had to store it in plain text. Which would not be a good
> idea.
>
> And if you decide to use keys, you have to store your public key below
> your ~/.ssh directory on the server. Why you want to avoid this?
>
> regards
> Frank