SSH Key pairs with Ansible - ssh

I have setup an ansible environment with a control machine (centos) and 3 other remote hosts (centos). Everything is fine with regards to the actual functioning but I want it to work a little seamlessly I guess.
I have setup the ssh authentication using #ssh-key-gen on my master server and then used #ssh-copy-id to all my 3 hosts for the passphrase and it works.
Now each time I run my ansible command to these servers it asks me for passphrase and only then the command completes. I dont want that to happen. I tried defining that in my hosts file as you see below but that hasnt worked. I even tried with the vars and it doesnt work with that as well. When i run the command #ansible servers -m ping it asks me for the ssh passphrase and the it runs...
[servers]
10.0.0.1
ansible_ssh_user=root ansible_ssh_private_key_file=/home/ansible/.ssh/id_rsa
Thanks
A

Now each time I run my ansible command to these servers it asks me for passphrase and only then the command completes. I dont want that to happen.
Generate your ssh key without passphrase.
or
Setup ssh key agent.
This is a bit off-topic for SO

Related

Access to jumpbox as normal user and change to root user in ansible

Here is my situation. I want to access a server through a jumpbox/bastion host.
so, I will login as normal user in jumpbox and then change user to root after that login to remote server using root. I dont have direct access to root in jumpbox.
$ ssh user#jumpbox
$ user#jumpbox:~# su - root
Enter Password:
$ root#jumpbox:~/ ssh root#remoteserver
Enter Password:
$ root#remoteserver:~/
Above is the manual workflow. I want to achieve this in ansible.
I have seen something like this.
ansible_ssh_common_args: '-o ProxyCommand="ssh -W %h:%p -q user#jumpbox"'
This doesnot work when we need to switch to root and login to remote server.
There are a few things to unpack here:
General Design / Issue:
This isn't an Ansible issue, it's an ssh issue/proxy misconfiguration.
A bastion host/ssh proxy isn't meant to be logged into and have commands ran directly on it interactively (like su - root, enter password, then ssh...). That's not really a bastion, that's just a server you're logging into and running commands on. It's not an actual ssh proxy/bastion/jump role. At that point you might as well just run Ansible on the host.
That's why things like ProxyJump and ProxyCommand aren't working. They are designed to work with ssh proxies that are configured as ssh proxies (bastions).
Running Ansible Tasks as Root:
Ansible can run with sudo during task execution (it's called "become" in Ansible lingo), so you should never need to SSH as the literal root user with Ansible (shouldn't ssh as root ever really).
Answering the question:
There are a lot of workarounds for this, but the straightforward answer here is to configure the jump host as a proper bastion and your issue will go away. An example...
As the bastion "user", create an ssh key pair, or use an existing one.
On the bastion, edit the users ~/.ssh/config file to access the target server with the private key and desired user.
EXAMPLE user#bastion's ~/.ssh/config (I cringe seeing root here)...
Host remote-server
User root
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my-private-key
Add the public key created in step 1 to the target servers ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file for the user you're logging in as.
After that type of config, your jump host is working as a regular ssh proxy. You can then use ProxyCommand or ProxyJump as you had tried to originally without issue.

SSH to Github not working

SSH has been working fine for the last few weeks since I got my new PC. I've had no problems but today I started getting:
ssh: connect to host github.com port 22: resource temporarily unavailable
I did some googling and found that there is a common issue with WSL which sometimes causes this, but I'm unable to SSH from my bash shell, or from cmd/powershell.
This is the part that confuses me, if I do: ssh -T git#192.30.253.113 I am prompted for the password to my key, it successfully authenticates and responds with "Hi alexmk92! You've successfully authenticated".
Great, that at least proves that my firewall isn't blocking SSH on port 22. But why does git#github.com throw the resource failed error? My initial thought is that this could be a DNS problem.
So I tried to configure my network adapter to use Google's DNS server (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) I even configured the IPV6 DNS servers just in case. Following this I did an ipconfig /flushdns, attempted to connect via git#github.com again and BAM the same result, however git#192.30.253.113 still works.
I'm guessing another potential cause is that github.com is behind a load balancer and one of the IP's on the cluster could be black-listed somewhere on my machine? I'm just pulling guesses out of thin air now, any help would be greatly appreciated, this is driving me insane.
After some further Googling it turned out that my machine did not have a hosts entry for github.com and it was unable to automatically resolve it.
In Windows Subsystem for Linux I created a ssh config file
touch ~/.ssh/config
(for some reason the base distro of Ubuntu 18.04 on the windows marketplace didn't have one) I then had to make sure the file permissions were correct:
chmod 755 ~/.ssh/config
Once the file was created, I edited it with
sudo nano ~/.ssh/config
and added github.com as a Host.
Host github.com
Hostname ssh.github.com
Port 22
Upon saving, I ran
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart
and attempted
ssh -T git#github.com
Everything now seems to be working.
In my case my ISP did not allow ssh, so it was not working from cmd and wsl both. Got around it using vpn
To have successful SSH connection to Github, SSH key has to be import into Github
Open Git bash or Terminal
Run the command ssh-keygen
Choose all default option
A private and a public key gets generated in the folder * < user_home>/.ssh/*
Login to Github.com
Navigate to account settings
Choose item "SSH and GPG Keys" from the side navigation bar
click added new SSh key
Copy and save public key content from * < user_home>/.ssh/id_rsa.pub *

How to setup SSH connection with Ansible?

I am brand new to learning Ansible. Here is a pretty easy example.
I have computer A, where I will be running playbooks from.
And 10 other host machines that need to be configured. My question is, do I just need to put the public SSH key of my host machine on the 10 hosts in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ?
I guess my understanding of how to efficiently setup SSH connections between my main computer and all the clients is a little fuzzy. Any help would be appreciated here.
You create a file called hosts with this content
[test-vms]
10.0.0.100 ansible_ssh_pass='password' ansible_ssh_user='username'
In above hosts file leave off ansible_ssh_pass='password' if using ssh keys ... Then you can create a playbook with the commands and call the playbook like below. The first line of the playbook needs to have the hosts declaration
---
- hosts: test-vms
tasks:
-name: "This is a test task"
command: /bin/hostname
Finally, you call the playbook like this
ansible-playbook -i <hosts-file> <playbook.yaml>
Ansible simply uses SSH so you can either copy the public key as you describe or use password authentication using the --user and --ask-pass flags.
Yes. As far as connection to hosts go, Ansible sets up SSH connection between the master machine and the host machines. You have to add the SSH fingerprints to the end machines. You can always skip the Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint]) step i.e., adding the fingerprints to .ssh/known_hosts by setting host_key_checking=false
I found this great video for initial Ansible Setup - https://youtu.be/-Q4T9wLsvOQ - maybe this can help!

Jenkins won't use SSH key

I'm sorry to have to ask this question, but I feel like I've tried every answer so far on SO with no luck.
I have my local machine and my remote server. Jenkins is up and running on my server.
If I open up terminal and do something like scp /path/to/file user#server:/path/to/wherever then my ssh works fine without requiring a password
If I run this command inside of my Jenkins job I get 'Host Key Verification Failed'
So I know my SSH is working correctly the way I want, but why can't I get Jenkins to use this SSH key?
Interesting thing is, it did work fine when I first set up Jenkins and the key, then I think I restarted my local machine, or restarted Jenkins, then it stopped working. It's hard to say exactly what caused it.
I've also tried several options regarding ssh-agent and ssh-add but those don't seem to work.
I verified the local machine .pub is on the server in the /user/.ssh folder and is also in the authorized keys file. The folder is owned by user.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated and I can provide more info about my problem. Thanks!
Update:
Per Kensters suggestion I did su - jenkins, then ssh server, and it asked me to add to known hosts. So I thought this was a step in the right direction. But the same problem persisted afterward.
Something I did not notice before I can ssh server without password when using my myUsername account. But if I switch to the jenkins user, then it asks me for my password when I do ssh server.
I also tried ssh-keygen -R server as suggested to no avail.
Try
su jenkins
ssh-keyscan YOUR-HOSTNAME >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts
SSH Slaves Plugin doesn't support ECDSA. The command above should add RSA key for ssh-slave.
Host Key Verification Failed
ssh is complaining about the remote host key, not the local key that you're trying to use for authentication.
Every SSH server has a host key which is used to identify the server to the client. This helps prevent clients from connecting to servers which are impersonating the intended server. The first time you use ssh to connect to a particular host, ssh will normally prompt you to accept the remote host's host key, then store the key locally so that ssh will recognize the key in the future. The widely used OpenSSH ssh program stores known host keys in a file .ssh/known_hosts within each user's home directory.
In this case, one of two things is happening:
The user ID that Jenkins is using to run these jobs has never connected to this particular remote host before, and doesn't have the remote host's host key in its known_hosts file.
The remote host key has changed for some reason, and it no longer matches the key which is stored in the Jenkins user's known_hosts file.
You need to update the known_hosts file for the user which jenkins is using to run these ssh operations. You need to remove any old host key for this host from the file, then add the host's new host key to the file. The simplest way is to use su or sudo to become the Jenkins user, then run ssh interactively to connect to the remote server:
$ ssh server
If ssh prompts you to accept a host key, say yes, and you're done. You don't even have to finish logging in. If it prints a big scary warning that the host key has changed, run this to remove the existing host from known_hosts:
$ ssh-keygen -R server
Then rerun the ssh command.
One thing to be aware of: you can't use a passphrase when you generate a key that you're going to use with Jenkins, because it gives you no opportunity to enter such a thing (seeing as it runs automated jobs with no human intervention).

SSH-add is not persistent event though ssh-agent is started

I did ssh-add. During the session it works fine, but when I exit and reconnect to the server with ssh it does not work anymore ssh-add -l says: no identities.
I do start the ssh-agent in my .bash_profile using eval $(ssh-agent).
Any ideas what I can do to keep the identities?
// EDIT
So here is my scenario. I am connecting to my web-space using ssh. I want to pull data from github using git pull. I added the connection to github and git pull works fine. But it asks for the passphrase. Doing a ssh-add adn adding the passphrase stops that, but only for the current session.
I have to start the ssh-agent using something like eval $(ssh-agent) because it does not autostart on the server.
The main problem I am having is, that I need a script to do the git pull which is invoked by a request from github, so I can not give it the passphrase.
If you're spawning the agent when your session starts, then it'll die when you disconnect. You could connect to a screen or byobu/tmux server which keeps the agent alive (you can skip an instance of bash if you connect like ssh user#hostname -t 'byobu').
Otherwise, have the agent come up when the machine boots so your session comings and goings don't affect it.
Edit: you can also forward your agent from your local machine. This works very well if you happen to have the same keys available on both machines. Try something like this in your ~/.ssh/config:
Host whatever
Hostname whatever.com
User username
ForwardAgent yes
You invoke this with ssh whatever, in case you are not familiar with that config file.