ssh-keygen between SuSE and FreeBSD

[Gavin Spomer]

I hope this isn't an invalid topic for this list. I'm on so many lists and I hate to join another one just to get help on one thing. Apologies if it's not.

I am able to use ssh-keygen to generate keys so that I can ssh from my Mac to any of my SuSE systems or ssh from my Mac to any of my FreeBSD systems, without having to enter my password. When I try the same thing from a SuSE system to a FreeBSD system, (I.E. I run "ssh-keygen -t rsa" on the SuSE system, then copy the id_rsa.pub to my ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on the FreeBSD system) I get the following message when ssh-ing to the FreeBSD system:

   Enter passphrase for key '/home/myusername/.ssh/id_rsa':

... and I have to enter my password. I've Googled, but can't seem to find the answer to my dilemma. Is it generally kind of a pain to do this between platforms? I'm finally very comfortable on FreeBSD and am starting to really get annoyed with SuSE. :(

- Gavin