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I'm trying to find a secure way for multiple people to access a selection of servers without them needing to know the password.

After reading this SSH Agent Forwarding seems to be the way to go and for extra security I can limit SSH connections to only come from one machine and turn off passwords.

Is this the right way to go about it though?

If so, is there a good guide to setting up Agent Forwarding? What are the best kind of tools to manage this type of setup?

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Please ask one question per post. (And I guess the 2nd is too broad anyway, but maybe not.) –  Arjan Feb 13 '11 at 10:43
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Just use SSH Keys, and make sure your users password their private keys. You add their public keys to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the remote servers. What happens is the user is prompted for the password to the key, then the key is used to log on to the server. I do this with all my servers then disable ssh password logins.

This works for both Linux and Windows (PuTTY) clients.

Try here for more details: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Using_SSH_Keys

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I don't think there is "a secure way for multiple people to access a selection of servers without them needing to know [a] password."

The nearest you can get is to use SSH with public-key authentication and use an SSH authentication agent so that users don't have to enter a password to start a new session at any server.

For example: Putty + Pageant.

So far as I know, Agent-forwarding is only useful if you have to use SSH-forwarding in the first place.

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