OpenSSH Feature Requests

[Steve Meier]

Dear OpenSSH-Team,

after looking through your website (Bug Reports, FAQ, etc.) this is the
best email-address I could find for submitting a feature idea/request.

Please excuse if this is not the correct address and kindly forward.

When working with OpenSSH in larger networks I often had to use
different keys for different hosts (with or without passphrases) to gain
proper access. The major difference was between keys used for "real
users" and keys used for scriting (scp, rsync).

I would therefore like to propose a "server related key" feature.

Let me explain this feature on a small example:

I have two host
1.) backup.mynet.local
2.) devel.mynet.local

For the first host I have a keyset with no password for automated use by
rsync to backup files.
For the second host I have a keyset with a strong password to login
manually.

With the "server related key" I would save the according keys as
~/.ssh/id_dsa.backup.mynet.local
~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.backup.mynet.local
~/.ssh/id_dsa.devel.mynet.local
~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.devel.mynet.local

The ssh client would then first try the key including the hostname
provided before trying the default key (id_dsa).

Of course I know, that you can specify the key to use on the command
line but I think that this would more convenient then to have everybody
write their own wrappers to accomplish this.

Let me know what you think about this and thanks for reading :-)

Best regards,
Steve