>> In seriousness, manpages are, by definition, *reference* documentation.
>> What the standard Unix system lacks entirely is any kind of
>> *explanation*.
>
> Depends on the manpage.

No, pretty much all of them list the command options, and that's it.

The manpage for bash practically lists the BNF grammar for shell 
scripts, but fails to provide any useful introductory material for 
anyone just trying to get started. (E.g., how the **** to I execute the 
same command for every file in this folder?)

>       PasswordAuthentication
>               Specifies whether password authentication is allowed.  The
>               default is “yes”.
>
> Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Does that disable CHAP as well? Or only plain password authentication? 
(If I'm remembering this right, CHAP is basically password 
authentication, but with a slightly more secure wire protocol.)

>> That's... interesing. I'm damned /sure/ the manpage said to put the
>> files into /etc/sshd or similar. And to edit the SSH configuration file
>> to tell it what (local) user account goes with a given key. And how many
>> simultaneous logins that user can have, what their shell is, and a bunch
>> of other complicated stuff...
>
> There's a difference between configuring sshd and using the public key for
authentication.
>
> You *can* do a host key, but in most cases it's not necessary:
>
>       Normally each user wishing to use SSH with public key authentication runs
>       this once to create the authentication key in ~/.ssh/identity,
>       ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa, ~/.ssh/id_dsa or ~/.ssh/id_rsa.  Additionally, the sys-
>       tem administrator may use this to generate host keys, as seen in /etc/rc.

I thought the host key is how the server identifies itself to you, not 
how you identify yourself to the server?

At any rate, it's news to me that you can create a ~/.ssh folder and 
sshd will actually take note of this. I don't recall the manpage 
mentioning this at all.

Post a reply to this message