difficulty with public key auth for non-root users

[Taylor Glenn]

Thanks Matt,

Turns out I had typo'd the homedir in /etc/passwd, so of course dropbear
wasn't seeing the authorized_keys file. Sorry to bug you about that, I
feel silly.

-Taylor

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Johnston [mailto:matt at ucc.asn.au] 
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 5:53 AM
To: Taylor Glenn
Cc: dropbear at ucc.asn.au
Subject: Re: difficulty with public key auth for non-root users

On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 04:14:19PM -0500, Taylor Glenn wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I'm having a bit of trouble getting public keys to work for users 
> other than root. I'm running 0.47 on a gumstix (linux 2.6.11,
uClibc-0.9.27).
>  
> I take an authorized_keys file that works for root, copy it to the 
> user's .ssh directory, chown and set the same relative permissions 
> (700 for ~, ~/.ssh, 600 for ~/.ssh/authorized_keys), and then try to 
> log in as the user--only to get a password prompt.
>  
> Is there something that I am missing (sorry I was a bit sparse on the 
> details, let me know if you want more)? Can anyone else replicate this

> behavior?

I don't see anything obvious that would be wrong - have you checked
/var/log/auth.log (or similar) for any warnings/errors from Dropbear? I
assume that logging in as the user with a password works fine? The only
other common issue is possibly line wrapping/formatting in the
authorized_keys file if it was copied/pasted. The homedir for the user
is set correctly in /etc/passwd?

Cheers,
Matt