I'm reading up on this and I guess im not doing something right. Six days a week I have to log in and out of 40 linux machines and it would be faster if I could automate my login. Works just fine on linux, Im on windows XP for the time being, Im using PuTTy Key Generator, I copy the public key into authorized_keys2, save the private key and tell putty which private key to load but I still get asked for a login and password. What am I not doing right :o

check the permissions on your authorized_keys2 file.. also call it authorized_keys and see if that works.. it should be chmod 600. I also had some issues with RSA vs DSA.. so try the 3 options and one will work if you have the correct permissions

hmm ok now were getting somewhere :D

login as: root
Sent username "root"
Trying public key authentication.
Key is of wrong type (PuTTY SSH2 private key)

dont work still im using SSH 2 do I have to put the public key in authorize_keys or authorized_keys2 ? or can it be in both?

what kind of key did you generate?

Public Key using Putty-gen

i mean the settings in puttyGen.. like dsa rsa v1 or v2

oh sorry, SSH2 RSA

try to create a key in dsa.. and then add that into the authorized_keys and keys2 file and see what happens

same message

are you sure everything is one one line in your authorized_keys file? check the permissions on the .ssh dir also

Yeap, its correct

are you loading the dsa private key in putty?

Yep I am

PermitRootLogin yes
RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys
PasswordAuthentication no
PermitEmptyPasswords no
X11Forwarding yes
Compression yes
...other options...