Passwordless SSH Not Working

I've been making full use of the ability SSH has of creating secure connections through the use of keys, but I recently hit a snag. Up to this point, I've been testing some passphrase-less keys between 2 HP-UX systems (I know this is not a good idea, but this is a proof-of-concept sort of thing). It's now possible for me to log on to the second HP-UX system as myself without a password, and also as another system user (lp) without a password by moving my public key around to the authorized_keys file in my own .ssh directory and in the .ssh directory for the "lp" user, respectively, on the remote system. To get that to work on HP-UX, I had to create my own "config" file to specify Protocol 2,1 (to force HP-UX to use SSH2 rather than 1 which is it's default on our installation). Recently, however, I created an SSH key-pair on my Linux system and tried copying the public key across to one of the HP-UX boxes I administer and tried to log in. I expected it would log me right in without a password, but it prompted me for a password as if there was no change. Are there any additional modifications to the config file I need to include other than "Protocol 2,1", or is there something else I'm missing to get this to work? Do I need to create the keys on HP-UX, then move both the public and private down to the linux system?

I'm not an expert, but as far as I know specifying "Protocol 2,1" doesn't force the client to use SSH2. You're merely giving the client the choice between two versions. The order of the numbers doesn't even indicate preference, according to my man files:

Quote:

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Specifies the protocol versions sshd supports. The possible values are '1' and '2'. Multiple versions must be comma-separated. The default is '2,1'. Note that the order of the protocol list does not indicate preference, because the client selects among multiple protocol versions offered by the server. Specifying '2,1' is identical to '1,2'.

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I'm not sure your original problem is a result of this, but it might be worth checking out (maybe your client is using SSH1 instead of the expected SSH2?)

Disregard me, I have my head stuck up my ass. I was quoting sshd_config, not ssh_config. In ssh_config, the order -does- indicate preference.

:bigsmile: Thanks for the suggestion, though. I appreciate it. I think I'm going to try and create a keypair on HP-UX and then copy them to Linux to see if that has any effect. I can't imagine it would, but hey...

Okay, disregard all this. Looks like I fatfingered the command to cat the linux public key to the end of the authorized_keys file. Thanks for the assistance, though, Guus.