Secure Shell This is why public key authentication was disabled for me in ssh (my home directory was world-writeable). I likely opened up my home directory for a student to write some data for me, and forgot about it. I'll remember that for next time. I must have missed that small detail in my semi-casual perusal of the ssh man pages. The debug process on this was

1. become root.
   
2. restart the sshd in debug mode.
   
3. peruse the output to find the line Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /net/home/jones
   
4. realize I must have opened up my home directory.
   
5. change permissions on homedirectory.
   
6. restart the sshd in normal mode.
   
   I'd be interested in hearing other strategies for debugging broken public key authenticaion in ssh using openSSH. In particular, where's the stupid log file???