SSH from Windows to Linux without entering a password

Question

I am trying to use ssh/scp from Windows to Linux without having to enter a password.

This is what I have done, and it doesn't seem to work:

• generated public and private keys using Putty Key Generator (on Windows)
• saved the files as id_rsa.pub and id_rsa
• copied them into ~/.ssh
• added id_rsa.pub to the Linux box in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
• I then try to ssh to the Linux box from Windows and I still have to enter a password

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

You need Pageant.

See the video Password-less login with PuTTY and Pageant. And/or the blog post Howto: Passwordless SSH authentication with PuTTY.

Answer 2

You have to run an authentication agent on Windows.

For example, Pageant, used in combination with PuTTY (graphical SSH client) or Plink (its command line equivalent).

You'll need to tell Pageant your SSH server's public key. After that it will deal with your server's authentication requests while running in the background.

Answer 3

Setting up SSH key authentication can be a bit tricky. It sounds like you're covering all your bases. One thing that often catches people off guard - you need to make sure the .ssh directory and its contents are owned by you and are read/writeably only by you.

Make sure to run this (on all your .ssh directories):

chmod -R 700 on ~/.ssh

If that doesn't work, turn on verbose logging by adding -v to your ssh command (you can add up to three -vss for more verbosity).

Answer 4

Try Plink (part of PuTTY)

 plink -v youruser@yourhost.com -pw yourpw "some linux command"

Answer 5

I'm assuming your keys are not password protected, and what you're getting is not a request for your key's password.

~/.ssh isn't used by putty on the windows side, and putty doesn't have a default private key setting. If you're using a command line ssh client such as cygwin, creating a .ssh directory off of your home would work. From putty, you'll need to configure and save a session.

From the putty configuration dialog, look at connection -> data, and fill in the auto-login username field. Then go to connection -> ssh -> auth, and set your private key correctly. Then go back to the session dialog, and save this session. You can also set the hostname if you'd like.

Once you have a saved session, you can use 'putty -load "savedsession"'.

Answer 6

You may also need to change permissions on your home directory:

chmod 755 ~