server - SSH Upgrade Problem in WordPress

This Question was answered on ServerFault by the asker. I am adding his answer here as a community wiki.

Here is the full solution, thanks to michaelmior for his help, it got me half way.

1. Run this command to generate keys: ssh-keygen

   You'll get this output:

   
   

   
   Generating public/private rsa key pair.
   Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user1/.ssh/id_rsa):
   Created directory ‘/home/user1/.ssh’.
   Enter passphrase (empty for passphrase): (just hit enter, need for a password)
   Enter same passphrase again: (same thing, hit enter again)
   Your identification has been saved in /home/user1/.ssh/id_rsa.
   Your public key has been saved in /home/user1/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
   The key fingerprint is:
   xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx user1@server1.example.com
   

   
   

2. Add the public key to your authorized_keys file

3. Move the id_rsa and id_rsa.pub to /usr/local

4. chown the files to the same user as your webserver (in my case apache)

5. chmod the files to 600: chmod 600 id_rsa*

This shouldw work.

However, my installation kept hanging, a quick look at the httpd error_log file show me:

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2966269 bytes) in /var/www/sites/....

Adding this code to the Wordpress wp-config.php file to temporally increase the amount of memory available:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');