Just thought I would drop a quick blog and link to this nice succinct guide for setting up SSH to be able to log in via public key.
Using public keys offers you a more secure way of logging into an SSH server and also opens up the possiblity of being able to log into an SSH server without entering your password. This is less secure of course but allows easier remote scripted SSH.
For example you can set up a user account on your server with limited permissions and then on a remote machine set up public key login capabilites and cron an rsync script to maintain a mirror image of your server without the need for any user intervention.
