Hi I can login to the GCE VM with WinSCP using my own username, cannot login as root...this is by default according to Google, and can be changed.
Changed like this:
Step 1: Login SSH and Su Root
# sudo su root
Step 2: Change password Root
#passwd root
Step 3: Config SSHD allow Root login
#nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
PermitRootLogin yes
PasswordAuthentication yes
#service sshd restart (I used ssh as I'm using ubuntu and sshd wouldn't work)
Tried to login as root via WinSCP but I get
"Received too large (1349281121 B) SFTP packet. Max supported packet
size is 1024000 B. The error is typically caused by message printed
from startup script (like .profile). The message may start with
'Plea'." Cannot initialize SFTP protocol. Is the host running a SFTP
server?"
Any ideas?
Received too large SFTP packet. Max supported packet size is 102400 B
Cause:
This problem can arise when your .bashrc file is printing data to the screen (e.g.archey, screenfetch). The .bashrc file runs every time any console shell is initialized.
Solution:
Simply move any scripts that generate output from your .bashrc file to your .bash_profile. The .bash_profile only runs when you create a physical shell session.
NOTE: Just for anyone who comes across this and simply wants to copy files and doesn't matter what file protocol they use. You can just switch file protocol from SFTP to SCP to avoid this issue. Thought it might be worth a mention.
If you used Ubuntu linux and try to connect the server then "Please login as the Ubuntu user" you should sftp as the ubuntu user, not as root.
Try that, hope it will work for you!
Thanks!
Hmmm, I added this in WinSCP in advanced settings under "protocol options":
sudo /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-servers
I can login with my own username and move files now. Although not exactly sure how this works, I think it somehow changes you to root user at login?
More info: https://winscp.net/eng/docs/faq_su
See WinSCP article on Received too large (... B) SFTP packet. Max supported packet size is 102400 B
If … (from the subject [error message]) is a very large number then the problem is typically caused by a message printed from some profile/logon script. It violates an SFTP protocol. Some of these scripts are executed even for non-interactive (no TTY) sessions, so they cannot print anything (nor ask user to type something).
To add to #ThatOneCoder's answer on the cause being too much output from .bashrc: in e.g. Ubuntu, there is also the system wide /etc/bash.bashrc that might be "too wordy" and cause the Received too large SFTP packet error.
It's a "system wide .bashrc", and if you want to execute code for all logging in, that's one location to place it. If you nixed ~/.bashrc and still get the error, check the contents of /etc/bash.bashrc.
It is happening because you haven't given shell access permission to the user.
I faced the same issue trying to login on my ubuntu 16.04 EC2 server as "root" via WinSCP. I spent a lot of time trying to fix it but in the end a simple workaround worked for me.
I ssh into the instance using PuTTY with the username "ubuntu". After this I typed
sudo -i
and with this the user was changed to root.
I'm trying to edit files on a remote Amazon EC2 Linux instance. I'm currently just sshing in and using nano, but would really like a graphical text editor. I have two problems:
I have to use sudo to edit these server files when I ssh in.
I can only login with the key Amazon gave me. Ex: ssh -i Andrew.pem ec2-user#55.55.44.33
Please help! I'm not picky, just any graphical text editor since using nano is a huge pain.
For remote editing, there are lots of options here: This answer, like any other, is sure to become outdated as more options enter the field.
For vim, the netrw module meets this need, and is shipped with the editor by default.
For emacs, this is available with TRAMP.
For the ATOM editor, see the remote-files plugin.
For IntelliJ, editing files on remote hosts is supported in the commercial edition.
For Eclipse, see the Remote System Explorer from the Target Management project.
I'd suggest starting with the editor you prefer and evaluating options from there. If you set up your SSH session to be able to authenticate directly to root (password auth is best disabled for root, but if you have sudo you can install RSA keys), then you'll be able to specify root as a target user for any of the above.
By contrast, if you really do need sudo, you still have options:
See Using tramp to open files sudoed to root on the Emacs wiki. New versions also support a ssh+sudo transport, meaning this wiki entry may already be out-of-date.
To help anyone that just need a quick command line text editor:
you can use vi:
vi file-name.txt
or nano:
nano file-name.txt
optionally use sudo if editing the file, eg:
sudo nano file-name.txt
Just modify the appropriate files on your local machine and scp the file into the remote machine.
scp <local_machine_path_to_file> remoteUser#remoteHostName:<filePath>
amazon now acquire Cloud9, which is a browser-based IDE that can edit your EC2.
https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/
Today I found two products that can use sudo, they are
MobaXterm (free version) and SmarTTY
MobaXterm has a button in the file browser that enables sudo mode. You can view, create and edit files as a sudo user. Use this switch when necessary.
Unfortunately, this only works through the SCP protocol.
SmartTTY works differently. When you try to save a file that requires sudo, SmarTTY throws an error and immediately suggests trying to save the file with sudo
Of the two products, I recommend MobaXterm.
Sudo is for root privileges for that particular command. You will need to use root privileges to edit system files. Even on a local machine. If you don't like typing sudo every time, you can type sudo -s. You will change to root user and it will show you in terminal i.e. root#ip.... The $ sign will also change to #. Honestly, I prefer not going root, because it is easier to make irreversible mistakes with root privileges. I've made some mistakes and I'm talking from experience...
As far as the second part of your question goes, you can configure various text editors to sftp into your instance such as sublime.
You will have to use the .pem key file every time you ssh using terminal. This is because AWS takes security very seriously. You can put the key file in your home directory. That way you don't have to change directories every time you open up terminal.
You can also edit a local copy of files and then use FileZilla to transfer. Setting up FileZilla to work with your EC2 instance is straightforward. You can give vim a try since it colors your code and is more advanced than nano. Use the command vi or vim from terminal.
Happy SSH'ing ;).
ssh -X user#server.
You have to make appropriate setting for forwarding.
I use SFTP Net Drive SFTP, which let you create a virtual drive on your local computer that will map the remote file system accessible via SFTP protocol. After the map is created, you can use the editor of your preference.
You can use nano, vim, vi or many others. However if you want to edit with a graphical text editor you will have to create SFTP since Amazon does not support FTP. One way is to use filezilla to upload your files. Here is a video on using filezilla https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VawBMj29g0o I suggest SSH though. Its fast and easy here is a video on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2-3HoRjBH4
I found a weird workaround for a GUI based text editor on AWS, I used Jupyter Notebook. If you have Anaconda installed on you instance, you follow the following steps
ssh onto your instance using ssh -i <location of your private key> <username>#<public DNS>
Start jupyter notebook on your instance using jupyter notebook --no-browser --port=8888
Open a new terminal window and ssh onto your jupyter notebook using ssh -i <location of your private key> -L 8212:localhost:8888 <username>#<public DNS>
Now you can open jupyter notebook at localhost:8212
Using the jupyter notebook environment, you can not only launch and run Ipython notebooks but also create and edit any files like a text editor.
would really like a graphical text editor
You cannot have a graphic editor, you need to use any editors like nano as you said or vim,emacs. Sudo would be required when you have to edit configuration files with root as owner.
To assist others with this same question, I would suggest jEdit. It is very capable, and it has a very rich plugin environment, language parsing, etc.
http://www.jedit.org
It has "always" supported sftp read and write of files with the sshConsole plugin.
I use it now on my AWS EC2 instance with the key pair supplied by AWS.
Lastly, it is not a good idea to edit files owned by root in the "production" environment.
Do your dev work in the AWS user's home folder so that you have full control of the source files. Then use a symlink to the actual server's file tree so you can serve it to yourself for testing. There are lots of controls in nginx and apache to limit who can view your dev site.
EDIT/UPDATE:
The NppFtp plugin to Notepad++ profides sftp access to AWS. I just tested it with the .pem file that they provided for my login at AWS.
For this, i'd suggest one of:
Learn and use emacs; it's quite powerful as far as textmode editors go.
Install your favourite graphical editor on the server and use X forwarding, 'ssh -X server.com'. This will allow you to launch the editor remotely, but have it display locally.
Most elegant in my opinion, use sshfs (https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs) to mount the remote directory locally, so you can work on the files directly using your favourite text editor.
I can call Remote Command by local file from console(-m option) in putty.
Is it possible to do the same from Putty GUI(Connection->SSH->Remote command, or elsewhere)?
So, to put it more clearly, the question is can we set a file as the source of the remote command in the gui.
Not directly, no - it explicitly takes only a string. Possibly one of the various putty forks has it added (although I can confirm kitty does not).
The only way I can think of to do it is to wrap putty in a script which reads the content of the file (whatever it is) and puts that value into the windows registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/SimonTatham/PuTTY/Sessions/NAMEOFSESSION/RemoteCommand before executing putty.
I set up Jenkins CI to deploy my PHP app to our QA Apache server and I ran into an issuse. I successfully set up the pubkey authentication from the local jenkins account to the remote apache account, but when I use rsync, I get the following error:
[jenkins#build ~]# rsync -avz -e ssh test.txt apache#site.example.com:/path/to/site
protocol version mismatch -- is your shell clean?
(see the rsync man page for an explanation)
rsync error: protocol incompatibility (code 2) at compat.c(64) [sender=2.6.8]
[jenkins#build ~]#
One potential problem is that the remote apache account doesn't have a valid shell account, should I create a remote account with shell access and part of the "apache" group? It is not an SSH key problem, since ssh apache#site.example.com connects successfully, but quickly kicks me out since apache doesn't have a shell.
That would probably be the easiest thing to do. You will probably want to only set it up with a limited shell like rssh or scponly to only allow file transfers. You may also want to set up a chroot jail so that it can't see your whole filesystem.
I agree that that would probably be the easiest thing to do. We do something similar, but use scp instead. Something like:
scp /path/to/test.txt apache#site.example.com:/path/to/site
I know this is pretty old thread, but if somebody comes across this page in future...
I had the same problem, but got that fixed when I fixed my .bashrc .
I removed the statement "echo setting DISPLAY=$DISPLAY" which was there before in my .bashrc. rsync has issues with that statement for some reason.
So, fixing .bashrc/.cshrc/.profile errors helped me.
When using PSTools (sysinternals) via SSH, you may notice that it stalls when you try the command. If it does this, you probably have not agreed to the license terms for each pstools command.
Solution: Log directly into the Windows computer via Console or RDP as the user you wish to SSH in as and execute each command in pstools that you need to use. You will get the license confirmation and hit accept. Once this is done, you will now be able to use the commands via SSH :)
Note: pslist is a great alternative to TOP. I have open issues with TOP command in cygwin where it only lists current user (not very useful). pslist does not have this issue.
Cheers,
-JsD
Or use the -accepteula switch that is supported by all PSTools.