Ubuntu For Free

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*

I recently established my network to use SSH connections. My three Ubuntu systems I discovered were using weak keys that had been generated using the flawed packages. If you haven’t been paying attention, Canonical issued USN-612-1 on 5/13/2008. If you’re using keys that have been generated since September 2006, it’s likely that you need to regenerate all keys. If you have any doubts, I encourage you to regenerate all keys. It will affect any key used that was generated on a compromised system. The biggest trouble for me was getting OpenSSL and OpenSSH-server packages to update. I used the ssh-copy-id command to make it the process easy for me.