Manually creating the .ssh directory

In some cases I have found that the .ssh directory is not automatically present and hence requires us to create this manually - although it is important permissions are set appropriately, otherwise the OpenSSH will reject the 'authorized_keys' file when a user attempts to login (assuming that 'strict_mode' is enabled within the sshd-config.)

So to create the file structure manually we should issue:

su username

mkdir ~/.ssh
chmod 700

touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 700 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys