# SwitchTower with public key authentication

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/switchtower-with-public-key-authentication/52984>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [January 22, 2006, 6:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/switchtower-with-public-key-authentication/52984 "2006-01-22T18:07:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Pau\_Garcia\_i\_Quiles](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Pau\_Garcia\_i\_Quiles](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Pau_Garcia_i_Quiles)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2006, 6:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/switchtower-with-public-key-authentication/52984/1 "2006-01-22T18:07:47Z")

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Hello,

I am developing what we may call a “distributed video player” in Ruby  
(this is  
NOT a Rails application). It works this way: I have several boxes that  
play  
videos and one server, where I store the contents I will later send to  
the  
playing boxes (videos are played from local files, not streamed).

When I want to play a video, I want to play it at once in every box, so  
I must  
send it to every playing box, wait for the files to transfer to every  
box,  
then send a “play” command to every box.

I’m thinking of using SwitchTower to automate that step. The problem is  
the  
password to transfer the files. I’ve read  
[Peak Obsession](http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/chapter/97) and it looks like I need  
to  
have the same password for all servers. I don’t like this approach very  
much,  
I think it’s not very secure.

So the question is: is it possible to use public key authentication in  
SwitchTower?

* * *

Pau Garcia i Quiles  
[http://www.elpauer.org](http://www.elpauer.org)  
(En general no puedo contestar antes de 10 días)  
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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Pau\_Garcia\_i\_Quiles](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Pau\_Garcia\_i\_Quiles](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Pau_Garcia_i_Quiles)\
**Post date:** [January 24, 2006, 5:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/switchtower-with-public-key-authentication/52984/2 "2006-01-24T17:31:19Z")

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I don’t know that switchtower is your best option here. Why not simply  
set up the main computer as an NFS or FTP server with the movies on it?  
You could have the other computers load a file every minute or so that  
would contain instructions to play a certain movie file at a certain  
time. This is the simplest way I can think of and would also guarantee  
that they play it together if their clocks are synchronised (the main  
computer could be set up for NTP as well).