Question

I am trying to set up my pc as a testing machine. I am part of a distributed team using git, but I am very new to using git. I have copied my public and private keys from my mac os x machine ~/.ssh directory in to the pc ~/.ssh directory and tried to clone the remote repository in the same way I would on the mac, but using git bash. It is asking for a password when it should not be….. I have even removed the other keys from my pc that could possibly require a password and only left the ones created for this project (that work on my mac without a password). I have also chmod 777 the ~/.ssh directory.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you set such permissive restrictions on your ~/.ssh directory, your system will refuse to use it, on account of it being insecure.

Try running the following:

chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/*
chmod 644 ~/.ssh/known_hosts

That gets you the same config as I have on my system, which works happily:

$ ls -al ~/.ssh
total 39
drwx------+ 1 meand Domain Users     0 Jul  2 15:04 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 meand Domain Users     0 Jul  5 10:26 ..
-rw-------  1 meand Domain Users    95 Apr 13 15:25 config
-rw-------  1 meand Domain Users   134 Mar 16 12:10 environment
-rw-------  1 meand Domain Users  1679 Oct 26  2011 id_rsa
-rw-------  1 meand Domain Users   392 Oct 26  2011 id_rsa.pub
-rw-r--r--  1 meand Domain Users 13217 Jul  2 15:19 known_hosts