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I feel like I'm missing something here. Why would someone copy around a single private key instead of generating a new key pair for each user@host?
by danieldon 16y ago
I feel like I'm missing something here. Why would someone copy around a single private key instead of generating a new key pair for each user@host?
- ars 16y agoYou don't need to generate a new keypair - just copy your (single) public key to the authorized_keys file on each machine. I can't think of any reason at all to copy the private key though.
- dedward 16y agoNo that's backwards - the reason is laziness. Sysadmin has two worksations - say a laptop and a desktop. He wants to SSH into all his remote boxen from either. The default reaction might be to just copy his already-authorized private key to his other machine just for ease of use - the proper solution would be to generate a new keypair on the new machine and then copy it to the required remote machines as well, so either can be revoked and tracked separately.