I’ve come to love encryption. My Linux boxes all do not allow password-authentication for SSL and instead use public authentication. I don’t use a standard 1024 or 2048 bit key, I use… a… 16384 bit key.. yeah.. that crazy dude’s the highest ssh-keygen will allow :). If you decide to be as crazy as I am, be sure to give your computer at least 10 solid minutes to generate the private/public pair. Having to do this on micro Amazon instances takes a while and I find that my ssh session times out before it finishes or I walk away and don’t get back until my session gets timed out.. or…. I forget it’s running and put my computer to sleep. The solution I’ve come up with is to just tell Linux to do it all in the background. I can run the following command as the user needing the key and exit the session immediately after:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 16384 -N "" -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa &