from Linux by Examples by mysurface

Search though google, there are a tons of tutorial for accessing a remote site through ssh without a password. I found some tutorial gives too much details. Sometimes, detail’s explanation may confuse the beginners. I just want to make things done, I don’t want to know too much about the public key, private key and network authentication’s stuff. Therefore, I am here to provide the clean steps without further explanation .

Let say you want to access to a machine with IP 10.0.0.4, and make sure you have command ssh, ssh-keygen, ssh-copy-id.

First, generate the ‘key’, the key will be used to open the remote machine’s door.

ssh-keygen

You will see something like that

Enter file in which to save the key (/home/myname/.ssh/id_rsa):

Whatever it appears just press enter until it ends, press enter for passphase as well.

Okay, the ‘key’ will be generated, something looks like ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Copy over the ‘key’ to remote machine, and enter your password

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub mysurface@10.0.0.4

Done. Now you can ssh 10.0.0.4 with username mysurface without password.

ssh mysurface@10.0.0.4