shosts.equiv not functioning?

[Jon E. Mitchiner]

Greetings! I have a lot of machines on a private internal network that is not reachable through the Internet and since security is not of a huge importance -- I want to be able to log into a beowulf cluster from the main machine without being prompted for a password.  Security issues is not a problem, traffic sniffing is a concern, thus the desire to run SSH.   I have not been able to get shosts.equiv working properly.  Im baffled the reason why it is not working and debugging info does not show anything.   I have the latest 2.9.9p2 compiled.   I wish to connect from Host1 to Host2, and so on.   To verify that /usr/local/etc/ssh_known_hosts is working from Host2 to Host1:   I remove the ~/.ssh directory (so that way no cached copies exist, etc)   ssh -v host1 gives me the relevant data of: debug1: dh_gen_key: priv key bits set: 118/256 debug1: bits set: 1057/2049 debug1: Sending SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_INIT. debug1: Wait SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REPLY. debug1: Got SSH2_MSG_KEXDH_REPLY. debug1: Host 'host1' is known and matches the RSA host key. debug1: Found key in /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts2:2   To make sure SSH version 1 works ok:   ssh -1 -v host1 gives me relevant data of: debug1: Waiting for server public key. debug1: Received server public key (768 bits) and host key (1024 bits). debug1: Host 'host1' is known and matches the RSA1 host key. debug1: Found key in /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts:1 debug1: Encryption type: 3des   I doublechecked the .ssh directory, and there are no files present there, so the keys do not get added.  Okay, great, so now we know that known_hosts is proper on host2.   Now, from Host1, I try to ssh to host2 to see if a regular user (non-root) gets a password prompt.  Potential relevant ssh -v host2 (from host1) data is: debug1: Reading configuration data /usr/local/etc/ssh_config debug1: Host 'host2' is known and matches the RSA host key. debug1: Found key in /home/jon/.ssh/known_hosts2:21 debug1: authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive debug1: next auth method to try is publickey debug1: try privkey: /home/jon/.ssh/identity debug1: try privkey: /home/jon/.ssh/id_rsa debug1: try privkey: /home/jon/.ssh/id_dsa debug1: next auth method to try is password   Strange.  On host1, I have the following enabled in ssh_config (filtered) as:   RhostsAuthentication yes RhostsRSAAuthentication yes RSAAuthentication yes CheckHostIP no StrictHostKeyChecking no   on Host2, I have sshd_config defined (filtered for relevant data) as: PermitRootLogin yes StrictModes yes RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes RhostsAuthentication yes RhostsRSAAuthentication yes HostbasedAuthentication yes PasswordAuthentication yes PermitEmptyPasswords no   I tried variations with no luck (e.g. turning off strict modes, etc)   Strange.  I also have in /etc, /etc/ssh, /usr/local/etc for shosts.equiv and hosts.equiv as:   192.168.3.1 host1   None of those seem to work.  The ip of 192.168.3.1 is the IP of host1, so one or the other should work.   I doublechecked logs to make sure 'host1' is a valid name, and it checked out okay.  According to secure logs:   Oct  3 00:15:45 host2 sshd[16042]: Accepted password for jon from 192.168.3.1 port 34495 ssh2   What am I doing wrong here?   Thanks in advance for any assistance that you can provide.   Jon