I've installed a Public Key, but my login doesn't ask for the passphrase

Question

I'm following this tutorial SSH Tutorial for Linux

I've manually transfered the public key to the remote server and I ran these commands also because it wasn't asking me for my passphrase.

chmod 700 ~/.ssh &
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

But still it doesn't ask me for my passphrase. I tried the newer automatic way to install the public key ssh-copy-id -p 2222 [email protected] and got this error message:

Bad port 'umask 077; test -d ~/.ssh || mkdir ~/.ssh ; cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys && (test -x /sbin/restorecon && /sbin/restorecon ~/.ssh ~/.ssh/authorized_keys >/dev/null 2>&1 || true)'

Is this error because I've already transferred it manually?

I ran ssh login with -v these are the mentions of public key:**

debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Offering DSA public key: /home/localusername/.ssh/id_dsa
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
debug1: Trying private key: /home/localusername/.ssh/id_rsa
debug1: Trying private key: /home/localusername/.ssh/id_ecdsa
debug1: Next authentication method: keyboard-interactive

I'll note this is prior to logging in.

Answer 1

I think those errors are because the ssh-copy-id script doesn't appear to be able to handle the -p switch for a different port.

This is the line out of my version of that script:

{ eval "$GET_ID" ; } | ssh $1 "umask 077; test -d .ssh || mkdir .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys; test -x /sbin/restorecon && /sbi
n/restorecon .ssh .ssh/authorized_keys" || exit 1

Notice there isn't any arguments being passed into ssh-copy-id that would incorporate the -p 2222 argument. At least not as the 1st argument to ssh-copy-id as you're attempting to use it. The usage is shown as this:

$ ssh-copy-id -h
Usage: /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id [-i [identity_file]] [user@]machine

Rather you'll need to do the copying of the keys manually, unfortunately if you're using a script like mine (on Fedora 14) when attempting to copy to a host on a non-standard port, such as -p 2222.