David J Rice

I was following Stephen Stewart’s tutorial, about pretty much the same thing, and there were a couple of mac specific items that turned up which I wanted to note down.

1. Generate a new DSA key on your main development machine

   • Make sure you generate it with a passphrase (enter it on the first prompt)

   • Choose a nice long passphrase

   • Choose a name (or not if this is your first run, id_dsa is the default but you will want to do this if your generating another key)

     cd ~

     ssh-keygen -t dsa

2. Copy the key to the server you wish to access * The colon and period at the end are important

      `scp.ssh/id_dsa.pub USERNAME@DOMAIN:.`

3. Login with secure shell to the server

     `sshUSERNAME@DOMAIN`

4. Add the public key to the list of authorized keys..

    `cat id_dsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys`
    `mv id_dsa.pub .ssh`
    `exit`

5. Download and install SSHKeychain, It’s a nice utility that handles the SSH-Agent part of things (which i’ll pretend to know something about)

6. Launch SSHKeychain, and in the menu bar icon select Agent > Add all keys then choose the keys from the .ssh dir (it should go there automatically) You should be prompted to enter your passphrase, and off we go!

7. You then have the option of adding the passphrase to your system keychain, which is good as it’ll save us remembering it along with all our other passwords

   • If you’re doing this, remember to have a nice long password for your login keychain…. otherwise, really what was the point of all this :)
   • Make sure it’s different from your account, and default system passwords too.
   • If your also using filevault, then it’s pretty certain your data is going to be secure.