If you don’t already have a public / private key pair on your local workstation do this:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, try looking for this:

ls ~/.ssh

Did you see anything? You’re looking for a file called id_rsa.pub, I would guess.

Now that you have generated your key, to copy the public key part up to the remote server, do this:

ssh remote-user@remote-server.com “echo ‘cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub‘ >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys”

You should now be able to dance around the inner bits of the internet to your heart’s content.

Thanks to Dan Lucraft for the technology behind this post.