Improvements on the passwordless ssh tutorial

[tecaspt]

I've never been able to setup passwordless ssh with the provided instructions on several Raspbian installs. It's always missing the step I added. Today, upon setting up a new machine, I remembered this tutorial and decided to try and correct it.

[texadactyl]

I take an approach that only uses ssh commands.

Goal: userA@MachineA ==ssh==> userB@MachineB

If you wish to login to the root on MachineB,
then make sure that MachineB /etc/ssh/sshd_config has the following:

 PermitRootLogin yes

and then restart the sshd daemon on MachineB (or reboot it).

While logged into userA@MachineA, do the following:

 cd $HOME
 ssh-keygen # Be sure to use a nil password!
 ssh-add
 ssh-copy-id userB@MachineB

Test:

 ssh userB@MachineB

Note that If the ssh-add step above fails, ssh-agent is probably not running:

 eval `ssh-agent -s`
 ssh-add # Try again

[tecaspt]

That's a possibility too. But that's up to folks on the Raspberry Pi website to see if they want a complete overhaul of the tutorial... :)

[bennuttall]

Thanks for the contribution.

This step is not necessary - I do this all the time - if you have an SSH key, you can get in without a password, but if you don't, it asks for a password. If you set PasswordAuthentication no then you can only get in with an SSH key (no password prompt is available), but it's not a requirement for passwordless SSH.

Personally, I use ssh-copy-id to get the key on the Pi, but we decided not to include it here because it's not available on Mac. I would like to add it anyway (just saying it's available on Linux).

@tecaspt if you still have a problem, can you please post a screenshot or something to show what happens?

[DG12]

Mac OS HighSierra has it.

ls -l /Volumes/HighSierra/usr/bin/ssh-copy-id
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10658 Oct 24 21:19 /Volumes/HighSierra/usr/bin/ssh-copy-id*

[JamesH65]

@bennuttall Since this does appeat to be present on Mac, can we do an update to include the copy option?

[bennuttall]

Sure