@Larry,

Thank you for your feedback and valuable insight! I’m glad to hear that the tutorial was helpful to you, and I appreciate your suggestion. It’s definitely important to highlight potential stumbling blocks like overly permissive permissions in the home directory, which can cause issues with public key authentication.

Your experience and solution will surely be beneficial to others who come across this post.

Thanks for sharing!

To improve your tutorial, you need to add one more thing. That is, public key authentication will not function if the user’s home directory on the server has overly permissive permissions.

For example, for whatever season my home folder (on the server) had 777 permission and no matter what I did – public key authentication did not work.

Finally, I looked into /var/log/auth.log which indicated an issue with home folder permissions. Once I changed my home folder (on the server) permissions to 700 – key authentication started working like a charm.