A poignant article from Dave Dribin recommending against using SSH without a passphrase. (Link via Daring Fireball.) I am going to have to take a look at SSHKeychain as it looks pretty handy. As an aside, I just got done setting up a Slackware 12 VM on my MacBook and am using MacFuse via MacFusion so that I can edit files on the VM indirectly using TextMate. It works great with public key authentication.