RFC: User login  management through Jumpstart.

Welcome to the dynamic world of Jumpstart where any machine can be re-installed at any time!
In the next few days most of you may be asked to login to the newly staged  machins, in order to perform some tests and trouble-shooting.

 In order to allow users to login right after installation, I suggest to keep the necessary  authentication data on the Jumpstart server, and re-distribute them automatically at the final phase of host staging.

Jumpstart server is usually considered a public area, therefore, such user authentication data should not contain any private information like UNIX passwords (even the encrypted hashes), or private keys (even encrypted with non-zero passphrase)

/etc/passwd entries (without password hashes) and ssh public keys should be sufficient to generate an adequate user login environment on newly installed machines.

One of the most popular ssh clients is "putty".
Unfortunately, exporting the putty-generated keypairs into UNIX environment  (to openssh or ssh.com's tectia) is much more difficult than importing  openssh-generated  keys into Putty.

Therefore I am asking those who use putty, to generate a public/private kaypair on any UNIX-like  host (Solaris, Linux, AIX, cygwin),

  using  "ssh-keygen" program provided with openssh:

  login with your user credentials (no su/sudo!)
  mkdir -p $HOME/.ssh
  /usr/bin/ssh-keygen -t dsa -f $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa_4_Jumpstart
       # Enter the passphrase twice. A long one. No empty passphrases please!
  cd $HOME/.ssh
  cat id_dsa_4_Jumpstart.pub      # Copy/paste it and send to me by mail
  cat id_dsa_4_Jumpstart             # Learn it by heart and destroy

Allright, the private key can be copied (copy/paste is OK) to you PC where you use Putty, and then imported into putty format using "puttygen.exe". Still, don't forget to destroy all extra copies of the private key, and keep this only copy in a safe place (encrypted USB stick, for instance)

Tell Putty to use this private key every time you log in to Jumpstart-generated machines.
For those who don't use putty, please just send me the public keys, anyway.