This is a short tutorial for how to log into the Lab46 system via SSH without having to input your login credentials each time.
This is only recommended if you know what you are doing and are sure that you want to go this route in logging into Lab46 without inputting your login credentials. I am not responsible for any loss of data or other malevolent uses of your Lab46 login should you fail to exercise common sense in safeguarding the machine you do this on with another password or something similar.
In the case of the PuTTY tutorial especially, make sure that you safeguard the key file that puttygen.exe creates well, as if anyone gets a hold of that key they can use it (assuming they know your username) to gain access to the Lab46 server. In short, you just made a key that unlocks any door in your house, make sure you keep track of it.
This section will cover how to do this process on a Unix based system utilizing the actual ssh program to connect to the remote server.
mtaft4@gnu:~$ scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub mtaft4@lab46:id_rsa.pub
mtaft4@lab46:~$ cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
This section will cover how to achieve the same results using the PuTTY program. There's a bit more to it than there was with the standard SSH tutorial but that's to be expected.
Viola! You've bypassed the security of SSH for the sole purpose of convenience and can now log into Lab46 without a password.
This process works by placing a non-password-protected public key that you created on your home machine (or one of the lab machines depending on where you did this from) into a set of authorized keys that your Lab46 account keeps. When you ssh into Lab46 from the identified system ssh looks for that key in the list of authorized keys and if the key matches one of them it doesn't prompt for a password or login as long as you didn't use one during the ssh-keygen or the puttygen.exe.