Big Brother? Key Pairs?

cwizardone · 02-27-2007, 05:58 PM

When I recently did a fresh install of Slackware 11, using the 2.6.18 kernel, I noticed the first time it booted it said it was assigning me a "public/private rsa1 key pair" and a key finger print, and did this for 3 or 4 "pairs."
Sounds all a bit too Orwellian for me. What is this? Some sort of computer "license plate" so our activities can be tracked?
Thanks.

gilead · 02-27-2007, 06:02 PM

Sounds more like the SSH daemon was generating the keys it needs for its operation. If you don't need ssh, just run chmod a-x /etc/rc.d/rc.sshd and it won't be started at boot in future.