SSH passwordless connection on Yosemite

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SSH passwordless connection on Yosemite

Hi, I'm trying to set up a SSH connection between my local Mac OS X with El Capitan and a remote computer which runs OS X Yosemite. However I'm experiencing some issue when making the connection passwordless. I noticed that on Yosemite, the folder ~/.ssh/ does not exist (cause maybe it should be created?) though there is /var/root/.ssh/ . I've tried to copy the content of my id_rsa.pub to Yosemite' folder /var/root/.ssh inside authorized_keys but still it gives me "Permission denied (public key)". Pretty sure to have set up sshd_config properly as well. Should I move to ~/.ssh instead?

Posted on Nov 26, 2015 1:23 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 26, 2015 7:17 AM in response to Afri61

In a new user account that has never used ssh before or at least never used an RSA key with ssh before you likely will not have a .ssh directory. You may need to create it or the ssh-keygen may do it for you.

To do a passwordless SSH session you do need to create a pair of RSA keys using ssh_keygen in ~/.ssh/ and you then need to copy the public one to the other machine - the one you want to connect to. You need to append it to the authorized_keys file in the .ssh folder of the user account you are connecting to on that remote machine. So if you will be doing -

ssh fred@remotemachine

Then you append your public key i.e. your id_rsa.pub to >> authorized_keys here is an example command showing how to use scp to transfer your id_rsa.pub

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh fred@remotemachine 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

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