Weirdest thing about my FreeBSD server that’s been bugging me for a long time.. I’m able to create rsa/dsa keys for passwordless logins but the catch was that it would only work if I was root on the client machine loggin in as root on the server. After 6 hours of trouble shooting and mostly relying on the geniuses over at #freebsdhelp on efnet, running sshd in debug mode, running ssh in -vvv mode it came down to a stupid little error in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.
The line in question was:
AuthorizedKeysFile ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2
and whoever set it up originally bunged it up because it needs to be
AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys2
to work properly or else sshd will always refer to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2 no matter who’s loggin in..
Hopefully this will help someone else save the nearly full work day of time to narrow this mother trucker down
