Hello,

I need a dsa key between a linux and solaris machine.

I've read the how to's, and i cant figure this out. which machine am i making the keys on?

where do i put them?

what file do i need to edit to get them to work?

THanks,

a dsa key to do what?? if you mean ssh, check out david ross's linuxanswer in our tutorial section.

I need a passphraseless, password less connection between two machines we have.

I've read that file you mentioned, and I'm still confused. Top problems.

1.) Which key do I put where? public --> ? private --> ?
2.) restart ssh services?

yes ok, i get the passphrase stuff... not a problem.

1) you put the client private key onto the server, as that's the way that you make the connection. the server must know about the client, not the other way round.

2) nothing needs to be restarted, this is something that totally unpriveledged users can do totally safely.

Okay, another question.

Lets say I'm logged in at "bob" and I run a program, that needs to copy a file over to anohter server. In the script it goes over and tries to login as "tom" and puts the file in a directory over there.

Do I create the key as bob, and copy it over to tom?

I'm really feeling lost on this.

I've gotten this to work before, when it was straight forward, e.g. just using passphrases. This, I can't seem to grasp.

Thanks for you help,

the logins are typically on a per user basis at the most granular level. if user a on the client copies their key to user b's key file on the server then you will be able to log in automatically whilst changing username.

Okay, still working on this.

I created a key combo on the client machine. I created it under root, as that is the user we use to run this particular script. Installed the key pair under the default /root/.ssh/

The client we are on is linux, and the server we are trying to get on , is solaris.

On the solaris machine, there isnt a /root directory, but it looks like roots home is / I typed cd and then did a pwd to figure this out.

So I put the public key under /.ssh and just for the hell of it, i put it under the user we are going into this machine as /users/charlie/.ssh

Here's the sshd config file from the solaris machine. *I only put the stuff that's not commented*

port 22
StrictModes no
UserConfigDirectory "%D/.ssh"
AuthorizationFile authorization
AllowTcpForwarding yes
AllowX11Forwarding yes
AlloweedAuthentications publickey,password
allowUsers charlie *theres more but not needed here*
PermitRootLogin no
DSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/id_dsa.pub

I have no idea what else to put, or if i have something wrong in here.

Sorry to be a pain,

i don't understand why this is so tricky... why have you changed the AuthorizedKeysFile values? why are you copying the public key anywhere? that's the bit that the client gives the server on login. the server needs the private keys, as the documentation states.

and as an aside... have you not noticed the little line there that says "PermitRootLogin no" ? leave it there and use a non-root user for this function.

"the server needs the private keys"

Well this could be a good reason why this doesn't work at all. I'm an idiot.

I made the changes, now i get a differnt error. But at least it uses the dsa keys. Thanks for all your help. I think I can figure it out from here.