dropbear and ssh keys

[Segura, Cynthia]

Hello, I am having trouble getting ssh keys to work with dropbear. I have downloaded and compiled buildroot, with BusyBox v1.1.0-pre1 and Dropbear sshd v0.46. I have compiled dropbear with: 
Use /dev/urandom (low entropy systems only). I am working on a small cluster. The admin node has a full Linux distribution (Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4) and the compute nodes are running the minimal linux. The admin node is using ssh: F-Secure SSH 3.2.3 (build 14) on i686-pc-linux-gnu. I have created the public and private keys on the admin node using the following command:

ssh-keygen -b 1024 -t rsa

and copied the public key into the compute node's /root/.ssh/authorized_keys

(I have also tried to this for dss keys).

However, when I try to ssh to a compute node, I receive the following messages, and am prompted for a password. Password authentication works fine, but to do mpi runs, I need to be able to login without a password. Am I missing something obvious? Does dropbear understand the ssh-key format or do I have to convert them using dropbearconvert?

root at chicken root]# ssh -vvv n1
debug: Connecting to n1, port 22... (SOCKS not used)
debug: Ssh2Transport/trcommon.c:3748/ssh_tr_create: My version: SSH-1.99-3.2.9 0
debug: client supports 4 auth methods: 'gssapi,kerberos-tgt-2 at ssh.com,kerberos-'
debug: Ssh2Common/sshcommon.c:587/ssh_common_wrap: local ip = 192.168.1.100, lo4
debug: Ssh2Common/sshcommon.c:589/ssh_common_wrap: remote ip = 192.168.1.20, re2
debug: SshConnection/sshconn.c:1945/ssh_conn_wrap: Wrapping...
debug: SshReadLine/sshreadline.c:2432/ssh_readline_eloop_initialize: Initializi.
debug: Remote version: SSH-2.0-dropbear_0.46
debug: Ssh2Transport/trcommon.c:1376/ssh_tr_negotiate: lang s to c: `', lang c '
debug: Ssh2Transport/trcommon.c:1441/ssh_tr_negotiate: c_to_s: cipher 3des-cbc,e
debug: Ssh2Transport/trcommon.c:1444/ssh_tr_negotiate: s_to_c: cipher 3des-cbc,e
debug: Remote host key found from database.
debug: Ssh2Common/sshcommon.c:379/ssh_common_special: Received SSH_CROSS_STARTU.
debug: Ssh2Common/sshcommon.c:429/ssh_common_special: Received SSH_CROSS_ALGORI.
debug: server offers auth methods 'publickey,password'.
debug: Ssh2AuthPasswdClient/authc-passwd.c:105/ssh_client_auth_passwd: Starting.
root's password:
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