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From: Gary Whitehead <gary AT whitehead DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: HostBasedAuthentication with OpenSSH
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 14:50:08 +0200
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Hi All,

I am fighting trying to get outward HostBasedAuthentication working with the 
ssh client under Cygwin on WinXP (SP2).

As a quick background I am using OpenSSH for logging in to machines remotely 
on my small (and heavily firewalled) home network.  My main reason for using 
this method is convenience, since inside this network security is secondary 
(i.e. nfs is running...).  What I wish to achieve is to be able to use 

"ssh hostname -n command"

to launch X clients from my server using X11 forwarding, and to set these up 
as windows launch icons. (What I really want is to able to easily launch 
kmail on my windows desktop..)

In a nutshell, when I try to connect using the Cygwin ssh client I get the 
following response on the windows machine:

-----------------------
bash-2.05b$ ssh atlantis
could not open any host key
ssh_keysign: no reply
key_failed
gary AT atlantis's password:
------------------------

Suffice to say this works from other unix/linux machines on my LAN, and I get 
a session without having to enter a password.

My understanding of this is that the message "could not open any host key" is 
generated by keysign, and I guess is a permissions problem (the key files are 
owned by SYSTEM:None and have appropriate looking permissions for ssh key 
files (in particular rw only for SYSTEM for the private keys)).  I have tried 
enalbing and disabling EnableSSHKeysign in ssh_config without any success 
(when disabled it complains that keysign is not enabled).

CYGWIN is set to "server ntea ntsec binmode".

I will be honest, I understand unix permissions pretty well, but am somewhat 
confused by the (necessary) mixture of windows and unix permissions in 
Cygwin, not helped by being a reluctant windows user.

Anyone have any pointers to help me here....?

I have appended my ssh_config file.

Cheers,

Gary.

# $OpenBSD: ssh_config,v 1.19 2003/08/13 08:46:31 markus Exp $

# This is the ssh client system-wide configuration file.  See
# ssh_config(5) for more information.  This file provides defaults for
# users, and the values can be changed in per-user configuration files
# or on the command line.

# Configuration data is parsed as follows:
#  1. command line options
#  2. user-specific file
#  3. system-wide file
# Any configuration value is only changed the first time it is set.
# Thus, host-specific definitions should be at the beginning of the
# configuration file, and defaults at the end.

# Site-wide defaults for various options
# Host *
ForwardAgent yes
ForwardX11 yes
RhostsRSAAuthentication no
RSAAuthentication yes
PasswordAuthentication yes
HostbasedAuthentication yes
EnableSSHKeysign no
#   BatchMode no
CheckHostIP yes
#   AddressFamily any
#   ConnectTimeout 0
#   StrictHostKeyChecking ask
#IdentityFile ~/.ssh/identity
#IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
#IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa
#   Port 22
#   Protocol 2,1
#   Cipher 3des
#   Ciphers 
aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,blowfish-cbc,cast128-cbc,arcfour,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc
#   EscapeChar ~

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