why not option to automatically add pub key?

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

hi Neal--

On January 11, ndbecker2 at gmail.com said:

 > One of the annoyances of ssh is the need to transfer the public key from
 > client machine to server machine, and append to authorized_keys.  Although
 > it's simple to do, it's annoying to have to do this manually.  Why can't
 > this be automated?  ssh offers to add new machine to known_hosts.  Why
 > doesn't it offer to add the public key to authorized_keys?

the debian distribution (at least) of openssh contains ssh-copy-id,
which is a simple shell script to automate that operation.

you can find the script in CVS here:

 http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/cvsweb/openssh/contrib/ssh-copy-id

i think it's also in the openssh CVS, under contrib.

Since i run with ControlMaster/ControlPath set up as autoask, when
i've connected to a machine for the first time, i just run ssh-copy-id
locally and it sets everything up for me over the existing connection
for future use.

hth,

	--dkg