[lug] Cron ssh suid problem

[Glenn Murray]

I am trying to run a shell script from cron.

The script does an ssh command to a remote computer to run an
application (analog, actually) there which produces a file which my
script scp's back to me.

I can run this script as myself, but when I try to run it as root (as,
presumably, cron does) my authenticity cannot be established with ssh
or scp, so the script fails.  I tried setting the suid bit
(-rwsr-xr-x) on the script, but that didn't help.

What is the best way to deal with this?  I am not root on the remote
computer.  I could establish an ssh identity as root locally, but I am
not sure about the security concerns.  Why doesn't the suid bit work?

Any help is appreciated,
Glenn Murray
www.mines.edu/~glenn/public_html/Welcome.html