Question

At work, I can ssh to a server with private keys set up on my work machine.

jake@work$ ssh server
jake@server$

I’m trying to ssh from home to work to server with the private keys. The process should look like this:

jake@home$ ssh work
jake@work$ ssh server
jake@server$

But instead its asking me for a password. If I call ssh server with -v, it shows that its looking for keys .ssh/id_dsa and .ssh/id_rsa but my key is named differently.

I can get into server by specifying the key myself:

jake@home$ ssh work
jake@work$ ssh server -i .ssh/idfoo
jake@server$

How do I get ssh to find the right keys for this two step login process?

Answer 1

You can specify the key using Host+IdentityFile in your ~/.ssh/config on work:

Host server
    IdentityFile idFoo

Or just this alone in the config file, to apply a key identity to all sessions:

IdentityFile idFoo

But I can’t explain why this is required only when trying to ssh from work->server from a work ssh session.