I setup passwordless authentication on a Ubuntu vm by ssh'ing into the localhost. I'm trying to do the same thing on another machine but it's not working. I believe I have the permissions setup properly and keygen'd. Is there a way to disable passwordless authentication? I have permission to view / cat files like /etc/sshd_config...is there a specific line that will shut off key authentication?
PubkeyAuthentication no
in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, then restart the sshd service.
It's set to "Yes" so I guess that's not the issue.
What are the permissions for the home directory on the target (remote) host? Ssh won't allow public key auth if the group has write permissions on the home directory. I've been burned by this before, and wasn't expecting it to be a factor, so thought I'd throw it out as something that you might not have checked and/or been aware of. If your home directory mode isn't 755, try that.
Otherwise, you might post the permssions of the ~/.ssh and the files inside of it.
The home directory is a NAS share that is mounted on both hosts so they're both the same home directory. It's 755 for anything in .ssh.