I have two Ubuntu servers, both of which have SSH access available. One server is a publicly accessible server. I have it segragated fairly well on the network from LAN machines. This public server only allows SSH connections using a public/private key pair. Normally, I connect to the machine with a Windows computer using Putty. Putty is configured on this computer to login with the private key. However, I now added the second server to the network. I would like to be able to SSH from that server into the first public server. I want to be able to use SSHFS to mount drives and so forth, mainly for transferring files and performing backups. How do I configure the second server with the appropriate private key (the one I currently use with Putty) so that the first server accepts the login credentials? (As a side note, I would be open to comments on my backup solution. I already have an external HD mounted on the public server. I was thinking of using SSFS to mount the folder where the external HD is mounted on the first machine to the second machine. I would then write my backups from the second server to the external HD through SSHFS.) Thanks.
Haven't tried SSHFS, but this tutorial might help: http://www.howtoforge.com/mirroring_with_rsync It also deals with private/public keys.
[solved] Thanks for the suggestion on the rsync option Falko. I checked it out last night and it too appears to be a viable backup option. However, I did solve my problem last night. As I suspected, it had to do with SSH key autorization and nothing really to do with SSHFS. Since the first machine is configured only to accept key based authentication, I had to create a public/private key pair on the second machine. The second machine is the SSH client in this particular setup. I created a key pair on the second machine and then copied the contents of the newly created public key, placing the key after the other keys already in the authorized_keys file on the first machine. Now that I can SSH into the first machine, I can use SSHFS from the second machine to mount a folder from the first machine remotely to the local file system. The cool thing, I think anyhow, is that the folder I am mounting is actually mounted to the first machine. Although I haven't done it yet, SSHFS can be configured is fstab to perform the mount automatically as well. So there are a lot of potential options.
