public key always asking for password and keyphrase

Solution 1:

Thats because your private key is encrypted...

You can add your key to an ssh agent using ssh-add or remove the passphrase (and with it the encryption) from the key using the following command:

ssh-keygen -p -f /root/.ssh/id_dsa -N ''

Oh I just realized that you try to use your public key to authenticate... You want to use the private key there:

ssh -v -i /root/.ssh/id_dsa [email protected]

And just to make absolutely sure, the content of the file id_dsa.pub goes into ~backup/.ssh/authorized_keys on the webserver. You can use the following command to do that automatically

ssh-copy-id -i /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub [email protected]

Solution 2:

This happened to me when the private key I had was not in OpenSSH format.

I originally generated my key on windows using PuttyGen and was getting bounced with this same thing.

I was able to fix it by loading the key in PuttyGen and clicking "Conversions" to get it to OpenSSH format.