I was attempting to set up an SSH key between two servers, so I could automatically back up a file from one to the other. This is usually a fairly straightforward and routine procedure; but in this case I had some issues.

When I got everything set-up, with the public key in the accepted_keys file of the remote server, I saw this error when running in debug mode, then I was asked for a password, which should not happen.

[me@host ~]$ ssh -v root@remotehost
...
debug1: Unspecified GSS failure.  Minor code may provide more information
Unknown code krb5 195

I was trying to get an old server running Fedora Core release 6 (Zod) to trust a relatively new server Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.6 (Tikanga) for a daily rsync of some files.

After a few tries, it became apparent that the DSA public key I had loaded on the Fedora 6 machine was not working. Being a bit reluctant to start tinkering around with the SSH Daemon on a machine that is hundreds of miles away, I decided to try another possibility, creating an RSA key on the RHEL 5.6 server and appending that server’s public key to the accepted_keys file.

After generating an an RSA key and following the prompts, then copying over the id_rsa.pub to the authorized_keys file, everything worked fine.

[me@host ~]$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

Just a quick workaround that I hope will help others with a similar predicament. In case you don’t feel like tinkering with an SSHD configuration file and possibly losing access to your server if you make a mistake.