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Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 03:45:48 +0000
From: "Robert McKay" <robert AT mckay DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: ssh asks for key passphrase every time
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On 12/20/06, burning shadow <burning DOT shadow AT gmail DOT 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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