How can I make raspbmc remember my passphrase?

Question

I'm using Raspbmc on my Raspberry Pi as my torrent/media server. I want to backup ~/.xbmc and ~/.config/deluge by tarring them and rsync'ing them over to my Ubuntu laptop.

This all goes fine, but I have to enter the password each time, which I find cumbersome.

Because of that, I've generated a SSH key on my Raspberry Pi, and copied the contents of /home/pi/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to /home/ubuntu/.ssh/authorized_keys.

This works, but when I want to SSH from the Pi to my Ubuntu laptop right now, I get the message:

Enter passphrase for key '/home/pi/.ssh/id_rsa': 

which is even worse. How can I make the Raspberry Pi remember this passphrase?

Answer 1

I've found a way to get this done. Log in to Raspbmc via SSH, then type the following:

openssl rsa -in ~/.ssh/id_rsa -out ~/.ssh/id_rsa_new
cp ~/.ssh/id_rsa ~/.ssh/id_rsa.backup
rm ~/.ssh/id_rsa
cp ~/.ssh/id_rsa_new ~/.ssh/id_rsa
chmod 400 ~/.ssh/id_rsa

After this, you should be able to log in to Ubuntu from the Raspberry Pi, without getting asked for a passphrase. Note that this will remove the encryption safety.

(Source)

Answer 2

I don't know how Raspbmc was built, but if it was built on Debian you could follow this guide: http://elinux.org/RPi_Debian_Auto_Login

Or maybe try Xbian!