Okay, so imagine this: you just generated an SSH RSA key and threw its public part on system B into ~foo/.ssh/authorized_keys and its private part on system A into ~bar/.ssh/id_rsa but can’t login. Why?
Automated processes (Jenkins *cough*) often need you to ssh(1) manually once, to accept the remote host’s server key. Do that.
The id_rsa file on system A must be owned by the user bar and chmod 0600 or 0400 (similarily, the .ssh directory has strict permission checks, and everything in the path until there). Check those.
And, the most surprising one of the day: if there’s an id_rsa.pub it will be used for offering a key to the remote host (B) even if it does not match the secret key. Deleting A:~bar/.ssh/id_rsa.pub apparently makes OpenSSH generate the public part from the secret key each time (or just put the correct pubkey there), but if one’s there, it seems to like to use them. (That was the only part of this post that was news to even me, of course ☺)
And, as bottom line: hello to Planet Debian from “mirabilos at work”, too. I’ll occasionally tag posts so they show up here, if I think they’re of interest, since I’m doing Debian work at the dayjob, too.