rsync/ssh passwords

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Dwight A. Ernest comments:
| John Chambers wrote:
|
| > The ssh docs don't seem to mention this at all. Is there any kown way
| > to get ssh to play nice and accept a password from a parent process?
|
| No. Try setting up public/private keys. There are lots of google-able
| references, including http://security.sdsc.edu/help/ssh/sdsc_example.shtml
|
| Works for me in a similar demand.

Yeah; I did that a few years ago, and I can see them sitting there in
my .ssh directory. Their access time gets updated when I use ssh. But
I'm still asways asked for passwords, sometimes  for  the  near  end;
sometimes for the far end.  If I don't respond in time, the operation
times out, and my script goes on to the next host.

It is supposed to work differently than this? It doesn't seem wise to
let  the  operation  proceed without demanding a password, since that
would mean that anyone who walked up to my  machine  while  I'm  away
could pass as me.

Note that I'm not talking about the first password query that  I  get
from  rsync.   Since  I just typed the command, I'm sitting there and
looking at it, so I notice the password prompt. The problem is when N
minutes  later  is  asks  me  for  another  password  (usually  for a
different host), and I don't notice the change to the window  because
I'm  looking at a different window.  That's the one where I'd like to
be able to give it the password earlier, since the result is  usually
timeout  and I have to start over.  It seems clear that ssh won't ask
me for all my passwords at the start.  I can easily write a script to
do  that, but it doesn't work, because ssh asks /dev/tty directly and
apparently won't take the passwords from its parent.