On Sun, 27 Dec 1998, Todd Whitesel wrote:

: Tonight I used ssh-keygen to make a key pair, and put the public key in my
: best.com account as per the man pages. Now it insists that I type in my
: passphrase all the time.

1. Use .shosts (not recommended)

2. Use an empty passphrase (ssh-keygen -p will let you change it); don't use
   if your machine may have others using it

3. Use the ssh-agent as part of your login process.  I have my shell set to
   /bin/sh and my .profile includes:

if [ "$TERM" != "" ]; then # don't do this crap for rsh logins
	if [ -f /usr/pkg/bin/tcsh ]; then # find "my" shell
		SHELL=/usr/pkg/bin/tcsh; export SHELL
		if [ -f /usr/pkg/bin/ssh-agent ]; then # see if agent is there
			if [ "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" = "" ]; then # don't run twice
				exec /usr/pkg/bin/ssh-agent $SHELL -l
			else
				exec $SHELL -l
			fi
		fi
	fi
fi

Aty first login, run "ssh-add", which will prompt you for your passphrase,
and ssh-agent will take care of all your authentication until you log out.
See the ssh-agent(8) page for more info; note that running ssh-agent in the
background instead of as a parent of your shell is *not* recommended.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)