thanks to all for the responses to my last email. so i was able to get
ssh to work without a password by deleting everything in /etc/ssh and
running ssh-keygen, placing the identity and identity.pub in $HOME/.ssh
and creating an authorized_keys file with the public keys of all the
machines. (NB: without the authorized_keys file passwords are still
required)
My question now is: why does ssh ask me to confirm the public key when i
connect for the first time? i already loaded the public keys on the
respective machines (ie in the authorized_keys file) so ssh should
already know the public key. Not only that, but ssh creates the
known_hosts file, which is almost identical to the authorized_keys file.
my concerns are (a) i would just like to know how this mode of ssh works
and (b) in the future i may have a larger network of machines and it
would be great to avoid having to manually accept all the public keys
twice, especially after loading them already. Thanks for any
clarifications!
-David-
