[vinceguidry]

I used to use an agent, the problem with an agent is that it will only try like 5 keys before failing. This makes it impractical to use a different key for each server.

Now I just put an identity in ~/.ssh/id_rsa and use ssh-copy-id to copy it over. Dead simple and easy. One of these days I'm going to replace the key, a script to remove ~/.ssh/authorized_keys before re-running ssh-copy-id will do the trick.

Though, these days, I'm trying to move towards making servers cattle rather than pets. I don't want to ssh into a server at all, just use configuration management to interact with them.

[pritambaral]

You can link keys to hostnames (with pattern matching too!) in ~/.ssh/config.

[locusm]

Thats what I do, didnt know about pattern matching though.