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Setting up SSH Public/Private Keys

We recommend setting up SSH public/private keys to access UNIX/Linux systems quickly and effectively:

  1. What is a public-private key
  2. How to create a public-private key
  3. Keeping remote systems up to date

What is a Public-Private key

SSH (on UNIX/Linux systems) supports login via public/private key. The idea here is that you never get prompted for username or password again when logging on to UNIX/Linux systems. It works from putty on Windows as well, along with SecureCRT and other popular terminal emulators supporting the SSH protocol. Very, very useful.

Also, PBUILD requires use of public/private keys to work properly. This mechanism only works if you use a non-shared account. We do not recommend that you set this up on some shared account (i.e. root).

How to Create a Public-Private Key

To create a public/private key:

  • Use ssh-keygen. Do this from your “primary” UNIX machine (where you do most of your development). This will be something like:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048 -C "Microsoft-internal"

Resulting output will be something like:

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/jeffcof/.ssh/id_rsa): 
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again: 
Your identification has been saved in /home/jeffcof/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/jeffcof/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
68:8e:50:3c:8d:cc:fa:77:2b:ad:cc:88:d6:5f:2f:4a Microsoft-internal

  • In general, we don't recommend the use of a passphrase, although that is up to you. Most UNIX/Linux systems are shared systems with sudo access (i.e. inherently insecure). If you do use a passphrase, then you’ll need to use ssh-agent to cache that (or set up your terminal emulator to cache that), or you’ll need to type the passphrase many, many times. We strongly recommend use a passphrase if connecting remotely and SSH is passed through the firewall (i.e. when connecting from work to home, that has a passphrase), or if you're connecting to a secure system. But that’s not the case here.

  • This will create two files in your .ssh directory: id_rsa and id_rsa.pub

  • Create a link for authorized keys (basically, this is the list of keys that can be remotely used to log in):

    • Create a link from id_rsa.pub with a command like:
      (cd ~/.ssh; ln -s id_rsa.pub authorized_keys)
    • Tar up your .ssh directory: tar –cf ssh.tar .ssh
    • Copy the ssh.tar file to each of your remote systems and untar it.
    • Be sure that the .ssh directory has a permission of 700 or things won’t work! Also, the private key file (id_rsa) must have a permission of 600.

So, to summarize: Create the public/private key. Copy the key files to each of your remote systems. On each remote system, .ssh/id_rsa.pub should exist, .ssh/id_rsa (the private key) should exist, and authorized_keys should exist and should be a link to .ssh/id_rsa.pub.

This gets you the ability to SSH and SCP from Linux/Unix system to Linux/Unix system without password prompts. You can use this same public/private key, if you wish, to avoid password prompts when SSHing from Windows to UNIX as well. I do that as well. Same key files work fine. To do this from putty, use the ‘puttygen’ program to import your key into putty.

Keeping remote systems up to date

As an aside, you can keep remote systems up to date via two mechanisms:

  1. Create some shell scripts to distribute the latest/greatest .bash_profile file (and any other files you’d like) to a list of remote systems. This lets you maintain the same environment everywhere.

  2. Use something like dotfiles to store important common files. Then a 'git pull' will update your system.