I have my .ssh directory inside an encrypted sparse image. i.e. ~/.ssh is a symlink to /Volumes/VolumeName/.ssh

The problem is that when I try to ssh into that machine using a public key I see the following error message in /var/log/secure.log:

Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /Volumes

Any way to solve this in a clean way?

Update:

The permissions on ~/.ssh and authorized_keys are right:

> ls -ld ~
drwxr-xr-x+ 77 vitaly  staff  2618 Mar 16 08:22 /Users/vitaly/
> ls -l ~/.ssh
lrwxr-xr-x  1 vitaly  staff  22 Mar 15 23:48 /Users/vitaly/.ssh@ -> /Volumes/Astrails/.ssh
> ls -ld /Volumes/Astrails/.ssh 
drwx------  3 vitaly  staff  646 Mar 15 23:46 /Volumes/Astrails/.ssh/
> ls -ld /Volumes/Astrails/
drwx--x--x@ 18 vitaly  staff  1360 Jan 12 22:05 /Volumes/Astrails//
> ls -ld /Volumes/
drwxrwxrwt@ 5 root  admin  170 Mar 15 20:38 /Volumes//

error message sats the problem is with /Volumes, but I don't see the problem.

Yes it is o+w but it is also +t which should be ok but apparently isn't.

The problem is I can't change /Volumes permissions (or rather shouldn't) but I do want public key login to work.

First I thought of mounting the image on other place then /Volumes, but it is automaunted on login by standard OSX mounting. I asked about it here: How to change disk image's default mount directory on osx The only answer I got is "you can't" ;)

I could hack my way around, by writing some shellscript that will manually mounting volume at a non-standard location but it would be a gross hack, I'm still looking for a cleaner way to do what I need.