On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:42:31 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>>> 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.

So I'm lying, then, is that it?

I suspect that I spend just a *tiny* bit more time than you do reading 
man pages - and I wouldn't make an assertion that "it depends on the man 
page in question" if it weren't actually the case.

> 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.)

It doesn't say anything about CHAP.  I'm pretty sure it also doesn't 
change the password encryption method from AES to Triple-DES as well.  
It's not likely to document everything it *doesn't* do, just what it 
*does* do.

>> 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?

Host keys aren't very commonly used AFAIK.

> 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.

It's always been that way.  The cited bit above is from the man page and 
says pretty explicitly that the user's keys are in ~/.ssh

Jim

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