ssh-agent asking for passphrase on non-keyed connections

[Markus Friedl]

On Sun, May 25, 2003 at 01:08:47PM -0400, Jason McCormick wrote:
> > do you have ssh -vvv output?
> 
> I've put two outputs on my website so I don't clutter the list:
> 
> http://www.devrandom.org/~jason/agent-success.txt
> http://www.devrandom.org/~jason/agent-failure.txt
> 
> The first log is my successful session from my workstation to a server 
> using my username 'jason'.  The server has my key in 
> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.  The second log is my ssh-ing to the same 
> machine to root that has no ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

is there a ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub file?

if not, then the ssh client does not know the public key
and needs the passphrase, since it needs to figure
out if the matching key is in root's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.