SSH login using RSA key pairs

Wow was getting ssh logins using RSA key pairs a real pain in the butt. I suppose if everything had been standard Ubuntu things might have worked out of the box... maybe.

In order for me to use the Bazaar Eclipse plugin I needed to setup ssh to my server to not require a password. This is because for some reason, the plugin can't handle any user interface type stuff with ssh. Sigh.

So I did the basics first. 

I ran the following to setup my key pair (I typed in a passphrase when it asked, to make it as secure as possible)

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048

Then to copy it to my home directory on my server.

ssh-copy-id suttonca@myservernamehere

But I still was having issues. It was asking me for a password even after I'd unlocked my RSA key. So I checked /var/log/auth.log on the remote server and found some errors like the following:

Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /home/suttonca/.ssh

I had to run the following commands to setup the permissions properly before the solution worked.

chmod go-w ~/
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

All that remained was to ensure that everytime I logged in that I was asked to unlock my key. In KDE all I had to do was run the following:

 ln -s /usr/bin/ssh-add ~/.kde/Autostart

Once the permissions were setup as above, everything worked just great! Hopefully now I'll be able to use Eclipse with the Bazaar plugin!