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Re: ssh asks for key passphrase every time


On 12/20/06, burning shadow <burning.shadow@gmail.com> wrote:
I have created identification key with passphrase (id_dsa). Now every
time I try to open ssh connection to any host, ssh asks for passphrase
for this key. I believed, ssh should ask for a passphrase only if host
wants to accept key. FreeBSD's ssh, for example, does it this way.

This is because when the private key is encrypted (with the passphrase) ssh can't read it to tell whether the ssh server asked for it or not :-)

To get around this issue ssh looks for the public key and uses that to
determine whether or not it should bother decrypting the private key.
It does this by checking all the .pub files in your .ssh directory and
if it finds a match then it decrypts the corresponding private key.
This only works if you've got the public key and it's named with the
same prefix as the private key otherwise it will always ask for the
passphrase to decrypt the private key.

I'm guessing that this may be your issue.

Cheers,

Robert

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