SSH Denied Even Though The Keys Are Authorized

I recently had to reinstall one of my servers. It was a pain. I didn’t have the partitions correct, so I lost my web install, and I hate how Ubuntu does not let us put /etc on a separate partition because of init. I struggled for a while with being forced to enter a password when using ssh connections to the re-installed. The output of ssh -vvv user@host indicated the keys were found and authorized, so I was stumped. I asked the North Texas Linux Users Group for some assistance and the first reply pointed me in the right direction. It turns out it was caused by incorrect permissions on my ssh files. To resolve, I used

cd ~
chmod go-w .ssh .ssh/authorized_key*