Connect with null passphrases (fwd)

Many thanks to all that so kindly replied to my help request, all your 
suggestions were very useful.  Misteriously, what fixed the problem for me 
was to recompile my ssh using a different compiler... once I reinstalled 
it all my problems disappeared!

Cheers to all and thanks again

  John Stefani
    jstefani _at_ yorku.ca

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 08:04:02 -0500 (EST)
From: John Stefani <jstefani@yorku.ca>
To: secureshell@securityfocus.com
Subject: Connect with null passphrases


Hello Everybody,

I have some cron jobs that use ssh (version 4.4p1) to connect to other servers 
and run certain tasks.  The users in question sometimes are real users, 
sometimes fictitious users that I created only for running the cron job.  I 
changed to *NP* the password field of /etc/shadow for the fictitious users on 
the servers the cron jobs connect to, and all works happily.  Here's my 
problem:  those servers to which the cron job tries to connect to as a real 
user, who has a real password, does not allow ssh connections with null 
passphrases.  I can't set the password field in /etc/shadow to *NP* because 
sometimes I have to connect as the real user. Does someone know how I can 
connect automatically to a server, using ssh, as a user that has a password, 
but with a null passphrase?  Hope the above was not too confusing...

Absolutely any thoughts or workarounds will be much appreciated.

  John Stefani
    jstefani _at_ yorku.ca