[Lug-nuts] I might have to cut back

I just spent about 4 hours setting up a pubkey ssh authentication. The problem was that my sshd was no longer accepting pubkeys generated on my remote system using rsa or dsa. I finally tried an ecdsa and everything worked. Running ssh -v, -vv, and -vvv didn't really help because it just fails silently. You have to figure out what a message offering the private key as the public key is important and then make a guess that something bad happened there because the authentication process continues. There are other messages earlier in the chain that make is seem like it can't find files. I spent a lot of time confirming file permissions. My books didn't agree with a lot of what I found on line. Which is right? A lot of thrashing around there. Granted, I'm retired and doing all this for fun. Well sort of. I do like to use a lot of this stuff and I find it helpful. But when something I, "know how to do" and is suppose to make my life easier and simpler, takes a lot of time, I need to reevaluate my approach. Your average person just buys a 3rd party tunneling/VPN service and goes from there. Which is great if you are running Windows. I think it is time for me to consider my approach and how I am spending my time and money. This just isn't sustainable. I'm not saying things were better "back in the day." There was definitely a time when it was hard to do a lot of things. We had "install fest" for example. Documentation was nonexistant. Then, it seemed like for awhile, things were pretty good. Things just worked and there was documentation and you could get information. I think there was a definite peak in usability. Or is it just me? Maybe I'll start by figuring out a minimum set of functionality that I need and take a fresh approach from there. -- -Gary It is a simple thing to make things complex, a complex thing to make things simple.