Here's what happened: I set up ssh key so that user could ssh from A to B without a password. I got user's password wrong in some other context too many times, and user's account got locked out. (IT uses Active Directory here) IT unlocked the account. Concurrent to the unlocking, a script was running, calling something like ssh user@B some-health-check-command every 5 seconds or so -- which seemed to work fine before I caused user to get locked out in step 2. IT reports user reliably gets locked out a short time after each unlock attempt. I thought the ssh key would allow ssh user@B some-command as long as the account is not locked. But it behaves as if, when user gets unlocked, B suddenly asks for a password and since my command repeatedly runs without supplying a password, the account gets locked out after 5 attempts. Account cannot be accessed at this time. Please contact your system administrator. My questions are... Is that what's happening? Or: what's happening? More importantly: How can I reconfigure things such that my script doesn't cause problems? Can I accomplish what I want without having to install Expect? (I don't know if I have permission to do so) Other notes: Not using ssh-agent currently. The ssh command is running on our Jenkins master, a linux box. A and B are Mac OS X. user is managed in Active Directory and normally can sign into all three machines. Other than these things and the ssh key I set up, everything else has the default configuration as far as I know.