Published: 01/11/2021

Recently, after 3 years of prodding, begging and asking I was assigned a Macbook Pro at work. Normally, when I work at a company, they hand developers a useful computer, not this client. This client I work for, gave me a Brand New To Me Dell Laptop on my first day. Welp, warm welcome. They didn’t care it took almost a month to setup the machine. Welp, 3 years of nagging has shown me that finally good things come to those who are persistent enough.

Now, with the new Macbook, I can do fancy things like have SSH configurations for the hours I spent connected to and working on remote servers.

The trouble is, using SSH in the past has always been: remember the user name, password and IP address; then log in, spend a few minutes fiddling with the password and finally get in. Welp, not any more.

Enter SSH config

In ~/.ssh/config you can set custom ssh config. So instead of using ssh adam.bourg@192.168.2.2 you can do something like ssh az_demo_app, which will connect you to the remote, passwordless (using a key file). This has totally changed my productivity. AMAZING.

Example SSH config:

Host az_demo_app
  User adambourg
  HostName 123.18.19.42
  Port 22
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Here’s the problem, since rediscovering this nifty tool, I’ve been using ssh-copy-id to copy up my SSH keys. The trouble is when I log in, some systems will still prompt for a password. If that’s happening to you, I’m here to help you.

SSH into the remote machine, then cd ~/.ssh/. Then do a ls -al, if you see anything other then -rwx------ on ~/.ssh/authorized_keys then thats the problem. SSH wants authorized keys to only be readable by YOU, on that remote system. It’s an easy fix, though, run chmod 700 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. This command will set it to read, write and execute for just you. This is what the SSH tool is expecting. Now logout and try again. This should work.