ssh-copy-id does not work

Solution 1:

9/10 times it's because ~/.ssh/authorized_keys isn't at the right mode.

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Solution 2:

Check in /etc/ssh/sshd_config to allow authentication with a key. You should have something like this in it, and make sure the lines are not commented:

RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile  .ssh/authorized_keys

Then restart sshd after you modify the file:

/etc/init.d/sshd restart

Solution 3:

I found that with my system the problem was the user directory (/home/username) was equipped with the wrong permissions set. It was drwxr-x-w- and it needed to be drwxr-xr-x (with write permission only for the owner). The solution was to use chmod:

sudo chmod 0755 /home/username

Solution 4:

I'm not an expert here but came across such issue too, here are my two cents in addition to all the other suggestions.

Sometimes ssh-copy-id copies the wrong key to the remote server (may happen if you have several keys and/or are using non-default names for key files) or your authentication agent is misconfigured.

Here's a quote from the man pages:

If the -i option is given then the identity file (defaults to ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) is used, regardless of whether there are any keys in your ssh-agent. Otherwise, if this: ssh-add -L provides any output, it uses that in preference to the identity file.

So basically you want to check that:

• Your system authentication agent (usually ssh-agent) sees the keys that you intend to use (check ssh-add -L output)
  • If you don't see the desired key, add it using ssh-add
• The ssh-copy-id copied the same key to the remote machine (just log in to the remote server using password and check the contents of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys)
  • If you don't see the desired key on the remote server, you can implicitly tell ssh-copy-id which key to copy: ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/some_public_key

Hope that helps.