It's slow, and manual, but this gives me one more reason to like prgmr, at least for my little side projects. You generate the keys, and send the public key to Luke. Your only access to the control layer is via public_key auth from that key you generated. Presumably on a laptop, with gobs of entropy available.
as much as I appreciate the plug, that key I ask you for? that's to get you into the admin interface on my side. I don't mess with the ssh keys within your image. (host keys are auto-generated on first boot, just like a real server, which has the 'generating keys in a low-entropy environment' problem described above. The image doesn't come with anything in the authorized_keys file; though actually, I could pretty easily adjust the creation script to put the key you sent me in the authorized_keys file of root... but I don't really know the 'right' way to do that; everyone has preferences, so I leave it up to the user.)
We've actually talked a lot about trying to write a xen driver to share a hardware entropy device, but it hasn't gone anywhere. (I mean, xen has 'vtpm' - a virtualized Trusted Platform Module. And nobody uses that, so why not a vrandom?)
I believe you're confusing SSH host keys with the keys used for user authentication. The private SSH host key has to reside on the server, so it's either being generated on the server or you're sending Luke a private key.
But I agree this sounds like a good way to handle user authentication.
