If you’ve dabbled with SSH much, for example by following the excellent suso.org tutorial a few years ago, you’ll know about adding keys to allow passwordless login (or, if you prefer, a passphrase) using public key authentication. Specifically, you copy the public key ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub or ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub off the machine from which you wish to connect into the /.ssh/authorized_keys file on the target machine. That will allow you to open an SSH session with the machine from the user account on the local machine to the one on the remote machine, without having to type in a password.

tom@conan:~$ scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub crom:.ssh/conan.pubkey
tom@conan:~$ ssh crom
Password:
tom@crom:~$ cd .ssh
tom@crom:~$ cat .ssh/conan.pubkey >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys

However, there’s a nice shortcut that I didn’t know about when I first learned how to do this, which has since been added to that tutorial too — specifically, the ssh-copy-id tool, which is available in most modern OpenSSH distributions and combines this all into one less error-prone step. If you have it available to you, it’s definitely a much better way to add authorized keys onto a remote machine.

tom@conan:~$ ssh-copy-id crom

Incidentally, this isn’t just good for convenience or for automated processes; strong security policies for publically accessible servers might disallow logging in via passwords completely, as usernames and passwords can be guessed. It’s a lot harder to guess an entire SSH key, so forcing this login method will reduce your risk of script kiddies or automated attacks brute-forcing your OpenSSH server to zero. You can arrange this by setting ChallengeResponseAuthentication to no in your sshd_config, but if that’s a remote server, be careful not to lock yourself out!