There is no doubt that SSH stands as one of the greatest system administration tools ever. I use it many times a day manually and many more through scripts for sysadmin stuff. Sometimes, like today I needed to do something that I have never needed to do before. And of course SSH is capable.

Due to a new network topology at the office I needed to be able to have SSH source more that one private key for authenticating to a remote host. There is more that one way to do this. I used the first solution as it was the most basic.

In the ~/.ssh folder create a file named “config” and chmod it to 600. Add the following line: “IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa.keyA” and add a subsequent line for the other private keys you want to use. For example you can have “id_rsa.keyA” “id_rsa.keyB” and so on. Make sure that those references actually match the names of your private keyfiles, if not, rename them. Thats it. From now on, when you attempt an ssh key exchange, all those keys will be sourced.

The second solution is more refined. This is what your ~/.ssh/config file might look like for this method.
Host *.home
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa.home
Host *.office
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa.office
Host *.wan
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa.wan

In this case the host you are connecting to will determine the key that will be presented rather than presenting all keys like the first example.

Thanks to Karanbir Singh and his post for helping me with this.