1024 is more than sufficient. Just use ssh-keygen -t dsa. James, the simple way to do this is to just generate a public key on each machine in the .ssh dir. You can to this totally by ssh. Then for each machine, (1) make a copy of the id_dsa.pub file and call it id_dsa.pub.<hostname>. Just make the copy in the .ssh directory. Appending the hostname allows you to copy the keys directly to the target machine .ssh dir without overwriting the existing public key on the target machine. (2) scp the id_dsa.pub.<hostname> to then target machine .ssh directory (3) ssh to the target machine and change to the .ssh directory and then use cat to append the new key to the authorized_keys file. "cat id_dsa.pub.<hostname> >> authorized_keys". You can add more keys later in the exact same manner. Note, you can also create keys for putty that will allow passwordless ssh access from windows via putty as well. You can always delete all the .hostname keys when you are done, but I keep them around so that if I add a new machine to the network, I can completely set up keyless access to the new machine from a single box. It also provides a backup of all machines keys as well. Just remember if you have scripts or cron jobs that need to run with root privileges, make sure you run the job as the user that has public key access between machines. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Thank you David, this worked perfectly. Used rsa instead of dsa since that was the type generated from the first source server. Perfect instructions. My gratitude to you and Carlos and the others who contributed to this thread. Many thanks, ~James -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org