Adapted from a Berkeley Guide, if you want to be able to SSH from unix or linux boxes (e.g. FreeBSD) without having to repeatedly put in the password, this guide will show you how to do that.

First step, on the client do the following:

mkdir -p ~/.ssh
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa


Have it use the default location (~/.ssh/id_rsa), and make sure there is no passkey. This creates a file containing the public key (id_rsa) and a file containing the private key (id_rsa.pub).

There should be one line of text in id_rsa.pub. Copy it to the server, putting it in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2. Then execute this command:

chmod 600 authorized_keys2


That’s it! Now connection from the client to the server with this command

ssh server


If that doesn’t work (i.e. it prompts for your password), you may have to try a few things. On one box that I tried, it worked as above. On another, I had to do the following.

ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa server


If that works, add or create the file and insert these two lines to ~/.ssh/config

Host server
{tab}IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa


If you SSH as much as I do, this can save lots of time.