Hi, if you read the demo a little more closely, you would see the section:

# works when run from z's homedir because you need
# permission to read the keys
$ssh2->auth_publickey('z',
                 '/home/z/.ssh/id_dsa.pub',
         '/home/z/.ssh/id_dsa',
          $pass );
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Try reading the latest docs for Net::SSH2. maybe that syntax has changed a bit. $pass is the password for your ssh key, not the login account

P.S. use ssh2, ssh1 is very outdated