If you use telnet to log into your remote server, or ftp to transfer files between your local and remote machines, don’t. Use ssh instead; it’s much more secure. And if you’re accustomed to typing in a username and password when you login with ssh, you’re only creating more work for yourself. It only takes two minutes to set things up properly on your local and remote machines to permit non-passworded secure sessions using public/private key authentication. Do it today!

Here’s how. On your local system do this:

% ssh-keygen -t rsa

When asked, just go with the default settings. This will generate your public key (a long string of text) and automatically insert it into the file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Now log into your remote system and open (or create) the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Copy the public key that was generated on your local machine and paste it at the end of this file. Make this file readable only to you, by doing:

% chmod 700 ~/.ssh/.

From now on you can ssh (and sftp) with ease, without typing in a password during login ever again!

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