2011-10-20 Eventually, the reason why key based ssh logins hadn't worked was simple. The problem has been, thinking about it. ~/.ssh/authorized_keys must not be group writable. Learned about `ssh -v' for debugging, but it didn't list the problem. I wonder how one can get informed about this problem without having access to the sshd logs (which might include a message about it). The concept of refusing to work as long as the permissions are unsafe is good, but the reasons should be propagated well. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke