Thanks to all for setting me straight on ssh. As several people pointed out, don't assign a passphrase to the host keys! I guess that falls under the category of RTFMP! So I deleted all of my keys, and recreated them with an empty passphrase. I still couldn't get to the z/OS boxes from Linux, though, until I changed the Linux ssh_config to Protocol 1.
Now everything is talking, and the only annoyance is this: When I answer "Yes" to the question of "Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?", I get: "Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts (//.ssh/known_hosts)." I am not sure if there is a way to change the specification of the location of the known_hosts file, but the z/OS Unix Systems Services manual says USS does not support this convention (//). As I said, everyting else works, but it would just be nice to get these entries into known_hosts so I didn't have to answer the prompt every time. Thanks again to all. Paul
