When working with different Linux/Unix servers, or when working with a Secure GIT repo, life is much easier after you have setup an SSH public & private keys.  Setting up a public & private key is really pretty simple.

Start out by create a public & private key.

ssh-keygen -t dsa

You will now be prompted for a location and a few other options, the best anwser is the default, so just enter threw these.  You will also be asked to create a password, creating a password at this step will require you to enter the password every time you wish to use the key, so best bet is to just enter threw those questions also.  After you have created your new key, go into your “.ssh” folder (note the . before ssh) and copy your public key to remote servers.

cd .ssh

Next we want to rename the public key so we wont confuse it after sending it to the world.

cp id_dsa.pub matt_dsa.pub

Wonderful, now all we need to do is copy the public key to a remote server

scp matt_dsa.pub remote_server.example.com:~/.ssh

Note, the above example copies the public into the remote server’s .ssh folder, if the server dose not have a .ssh folder, you may need to create it.  After the public key has been copied, we need to put it into the “authorized_keys” file.

cat matt_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys

and that’s it, just exit out of your remote server, and try to connect again, it should not ask you for a password, but just now connect.  If you are using this your git account, just copy this key into the git’s users authorized_keys file.