Just so I won't forget and maybe google will spider this and it'll help somebody. There's a (kinda) bug [bugs.gentoo.org] in gentoo's 2007.0 stage3. I'm using amd64, but it's due to the version of ssh which was put into the stage3, so I'm sure it's across platforms. /etc/skel/.ssh is created with permissions 0600 - so when you add a user, by default they won't be able to cd to ~/.ssh. That's a problem when using ssh keys and it frustrated me for a few minutes because I couldn't login in to new servers.

Fix by the following:


After this any new users can use their .ssh directory. If you've already added users and are having problems here's a quick fix: