I finally managed to setup the SSH server on my server to accept public/private key authentication. After I tried everything anybody has ever tried I almost gave up. The problem was that there was a value set for the AuthorizedKeysFile option in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. When I removed this line everything worked like a charm. Strange thing is that the value was “~/.ssh/authorized_keys” which is exactly where the file was and according to the man pages it is the default path. Oh boy… Well it’s working