can't figure out ssh, read lots of docs...

[Steven Friedrich]

Thanks to Nathan Kinkade, Roland Smith, Greg Barniskis, and Rick Preston for 
the replies.  Each gave me quite a bit of info and I'm still digesting it.

I've been successful using ssh-agent, though I have to enter the passphrase 
each time I run my script.  That's really only an annoyance now because I'm 
developing the script and have to enter it often. That goes away when the 
script is stable.

I've been using ssh to login to my local machines for quite some time and 
never realized I didn't have it set up quite right, because it was asking for 
a passwd, which means all other means failed.  

What I did notice though, is that I can't login as root using ssh.  I haven't 
found this mentioned in the man pages.

Anybody know where it's documented, whether it can be changed, and would that 
be a colossal mistake?

I mean, hey, it's a secure shell, why can't I login as root?

The reason I want to use root is because I'm trying to scp /etc/master.passwd 
from each of my four machines so I can write them to a CD for backup.