Programming

Ahh...well, that's the part that I wasn't getting. I didn't realize that would work. I'm an SA n00b for sure, lol! THANKS! I suppose the upfront work may be annoying, but at least it'll only have to be done once!

Much appreciated, and yes I agree, this is a much better solution than my hacking away supposing they'll let me do it. They may still say "well, if your dreamwarrior account gets hacked then the hacker has access to everything now...don't they." In which case, I suppose I can use the passphrase on the key and at least (according to Corona) I should only have to enter the passphrase once to enable the key and never again. Then there's another level of security.

The trick is you need to run ssh-agent, export the variables it gives you, then run ssh-add, at which point it will ask you for the password for your key. Once that's done, you'll be able to ssh, sftp, or scp into anything that accepts that key without a password until you kill that instance of ssh-agent. I login in the morning, enter the password once, do any remote stuff without any further passwords prompts, then kill the agent and logout at the end of the day

Code:

$ ssh-agent
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-jDJEL19095/agent.19095; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=19096; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
echo Agent pid 19096;
$ SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-jDJEL19095/agent.19095; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
$ SSH_AGENT_PID=19096; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
$ ssh-add
Enter passphrase for /home/xyz/.ssh/id_dsa:
Identity added: /home/xyz/.ssh/id_dsa (/home/xyz/.ssh/id_dsa)
$ ssh anemone
Last login: Thu Mar 11 16:01:39 CST 2010 from mecgentoo.vpn on ssh
Last login: Fri Mar 12 16:57:17 2010 from mecgentoo.vpn
xyz@anemone ~ $

If you need to login to one remote machine from another remote machine, it can even forward ssh-agent from one machine to another if you use ssh -A.

Thanks for all the info! Much appreciated....