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Comment by yoaquim | Hacker News Reader

What, if any, are the downsides to this?

Is it just as OP states in article, where you have to interact with the authentication process to provide a key (assuming no key is associated to host as you explain)?

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The downside is that if you use a large range of servers, you will have to configure them to tell SSH what identities to use. This can be cumbersome if you ssh by alias (e.g. 'foo' rather than 'foo.yourcompany.com').

If you only SSH into servers you trust (a sensible practice) then the benefit is marginal.

Note that it does accept wildcards so you can do rules for *.mycompany.com

You can also use placeholders for keys, so for example I have a ssh config like:

    Host *.mycompany.com
        # Employer specific yubikey stuff
    
    Host *.mydomain.com
        IdentityFile ~/.ssh/keys/id_primary

    Host *
        IdentitiesOnly yes
        IdentityFile ~/.ssh/keys/%r@%h # uses ~/.ssh/keys/git@github.com for github for example

I originally started doing this because I would have so many keys that servers would reject me for too many authentication attempts, but it also helps make it easy to use distinct keys for distinct purposes and avoiding fingerprinting like this*

Additionally, you can also do:

Host foo foo.example.com some.other.alias

Nice tip about the placeholder, I will steal that. Thanks.

Yes that's exactly what I do. I just left it as an "exercise for the reader" to not make the comment too long :)

This kind of stuff is also useful, for example, for AWS machines:

  Host ec2-*.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      # KeepAlive of 50 seconds, because AWS times out after 60:
      # https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/elb-idle-timeout-control/
      ServerAliveInterval 50

I am more curious what is the upside?

That you trying to SSH into some random server doesn't know that you also use github?

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