This is the ssh configuration I wish I would have had when starting out with this program, so that it would have been more plain to me how best to use this program.
This repository contains the ssh configuration files I use to make life easier across the several hosts that I use. Everywhere that I have an account, I checkout this repository and run "make" to setup the symlinks and install the ~/.ssh/config file (which is generated from a template). Before I setup this repository, I either just typed my password every time, or I'd create a new private/public keypair on a particular host that I needed access from. Managing my keypairs became a nightmare, so in recent years I've fallen back to just always typing my password --- but that's dangerous because programmers are lazy.
To make this work, I generate a different private/public key pair on every machine I have physical access to (my desktop, and two laptops). One way to do this that I like is to generate a completely random passphrase, and then have the passphrase stored in my login keychain.
openssl rand -base64 24
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048
The first time you use the key for an ssh connection to another host, both Ubuntu and OSX prompt for the passphrase and have an option that will store the passphrase in your login keychain. The advantage of this is that you never have to remember passphrases, and only worry about the strength of your login password.
I then add the public key to the authorized_keys file in this repository, making it easy to distribute the key to all the hosts that I have access to. And when I finally graduate and have to return my school laptop, I can easily remove the authorization for that particular keypair and update all the hosts that I have accounts on.
The ~/.ssh/config is mostly so simple that it could have been a symbolic link as well. I made it a template-script because I have a few private keys that I need to copy from host to host, but I haven't bothered to install them on most of my accounts. So the script checks to see if the key file exists, and adds a line to the configuration if it does.
Most of the configuration is done in the Host * section at the end of config.sh, and these are the settings that seem to work best for me. Turning on ForwardAgent allows the credentials from my laptop to be passed along if I am chaining from one host to another. (See my dotfiles repository for how I update the agent connection in my tmux session. Bash completion for ssh hostnames is also worth checking out.)
Another setting that I considered is the ControlMaster option to allow connection sharing; it's worth googling if speed matters to you.