When attempting to log into the server, I was prompted for a password as if the server did not have my public key. It certainly did. Checking /var/log/auth.log, I noticed this:

# /var/log/auth.log
Nov 2 17:47:37 hostname sshd[2053]: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /home/myuser

Somehow (likely due to user error), the permissions for /home/myuser was set to 0777!

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$ ls -lah /home | grep myuser
drwxrwxrwx 119 myuser myuser 8.0K 2010-11-02 17:45 myuser

The solution was to restore the directory permissions to what they should be – r/w access for the owner only.

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$ chmod 0755 ~myuser
$ ls -lah /home | grep myuser
drwxr-xr-x 119 myuser myuser 8.0K 2010-11-02 17:45 myuser

Hopefully now you’ll be able to log in with your private key.

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$ ssh myhost
$ tail /var/log/auth.log
Nov  2 17:50:36 hostname sshd[2212]: Accepted publickey for myuser from 192.168.1.XXX port XXXXX ssh2

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ssh-copy-id -p XXXX -i '~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub' username@host

However, that didn’t do anything but output an error:

Bad port 'umask 077; test -d .ssh || mkdir .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

The solution was to enclose it in quotes as follows:

ssh-copy-id ‘-p XXXX -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@host’

Hope that helps.

(The above error probably doesn’t make any sense. ssh-copy-id is a shell script. The command that appears in the error message is a command sent to the server via SSH. Feel free to take a look at the file: cat `locate ssh-copy-id | head -n1`)