SSH key does not work from a remote shell

Question

I've come across an interesting problem and I literally don't know where to start looking to resolve it!

The VCS machine in our office is running gitweb and my public key is on this machine fine. I can access the repositories from my machine without any problems, using my key.

However, if I am on any kind of remote shell, key authentication does not work! It falls back to password authentication, but the git user is configured to not have a password, so this is no good!

I have confirmed the problem by SSHing into another machine in the office and from there back into my machine. Also, by physically using another machine to SSH into my machine and even by going through a VPN to access my machine from a different network. In all cases, authentication with the git server fails although they are identical commands to those I run locally.

My first reaction was that gitosis (which automatically handles the keys) was misconfigured. It does include a number of additional security options on the keys:

no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty

However, the problem is confined to me - other machines seem to be able to authenticate without a problem whether the shell is remote or local, which suggests that it is my SSH that is misconfigured. I did change the default port away from 22 by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config but everything else should be at the default values. It's possible someone else has edited the config, so any things to look out for would be appreciated!

My machine is running Ubuntu 9.04 (obviously, upgrading might be a solution). Really, I'm just after a starting point - something to google for to resolve the problem. If this is something simple that someone has come across before then that's fantastic but as I say, I'm really at a loss for now!

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I'm unclear on your description of what keys and configuration files reside on what systems. However, if you are accustomed to being able to use your private key from a box to which you have not copied it, then you are doing so through use of SSH agent forwarding. Try removing 'no-agent-forwarding' from the option list that you quoted above and see if that resolves your problem.

Answer 2

I had multiple keys in my ~/.ssh folder. Clearing out all of them but the main id_dsa key and re-adding that key to gitosis resolved the problem.

It's still a mystery why I was getting such strange behaviour! It must have been processing the keys differently via SSH / on a local shell. If anyone can shed any light on it, I'd be interested (I have the -v and -vvv output for local shells and remote SSH shells if you need it).

I wanted to add this in case someone else comes across the problem! (although it's very hard to search for, because there are so many questions on how to set up ssh keys at all)

Thanks very much to everyone who helped out.