How to inject commands at the start of an interactive SSH session? - ssh

I want to be able to just ssh to a server where I cannot modify profiles and set up the environment with several commands before getting the usual interactive session.
Any ideas?
I've been using an expect script with an "interact" command at the end - which works for most things but is clumsy and breaks some console apps. Also been extermienting with empty-expect and socat. Any other suggestions?

If you're able to write somewhere on the filesystem, you may be able to invoke bash with a custom rc file like this:
ssh me#example.com -t bash --rcfile /home/user/my_private_profile -i
Note that this appears to only work for interactive shell, not login shells. The -t option to ssh makes it allocate a pty even though you're specifying a command.
If you can't write to the filesystem anywhere, you could use a subshell to supply a named pipe as the rcfile:
$ ssh ares -t "bash --rcfile <(echo 'FOO=foo';echo 'BAR=bar') -i"
axa#ares:~$ echo $FOO
foo
axa#ares:~$ echo $BAR
bar

Related

One liner ssh different enviroment variables than normal ssh

I am using AWS Beanstalk, in case it may be relevant to the question.
The issue that I have is that when I do from my local terminal:
ssh mozart-api printenv
I missing most of the enviroment variables, instead if I do:
ssh mozart-api
..wait to open..
printenv
I get all enviroment varibles as I was expecting.
At first I thought it could be an ssh configuration in server but can't find anything strange.
if I do:
ssh mozart-api "export hello=123 && echo $hello"
then it outputs 123, which means that variables can be set and queried, however I just cannot get the existing variables from the server.
This is causing an issue because I am preparing a script that will run a command in ssh on this server, but because the variables are not loaded the project fails to open the database.
I tried reimporting them in one liner:
ssh mozart-api "sudo chmod +777 /etc/profile.d/sh.local && (/opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/get-config environment | jq -r 'keys[] as \$k | \"echo export \(\$k)=\(.[\$k])\"') > /etc/profile.d/sh.local && printenv"
But still can't see the new added variables.
ssh mozart-api executes a login shell, which probably sources one or more files that define your environment variables.
ssh mozart-api printenv executes printenv instead of a login shell, so the only variables you see are the ones you inherit from the parent process, not any of the variables defined in your shell configuration files.

Script Stops after doing SSH

When I am doing SSH to some machine inside the for loop it is doing the ssh but not able to execute further.
Code is like:
string=c01.test.cloud.com,c02.test.cloud.com
for i in $(echo $string | sed "s/,/ /g")
do
ssh -t -t AppAccount#$i
cd a/b/c
str2=x,y,z
done
I take it from your question that you expect cd a/b/c to run on a remote server? That's not what this script is doing. The call to ssh opens an SSH tunnel, and provides you an interactive terminal connection. It then waits for that connection to terminate. (I suspect if you pressed Control-D, the script would continue.) Your use of -t -t here is particularly strange. Why do you want to force a remote pty? This is making the problem worse (not that much, since it won't work anyway, but this seems the opposite of what you'd want).
I think this is the script you meant:
string=c01.test.cloud.com,c02.test.cloud.com
for i in $(echo $string | sed "s/,/ /g")
do
ssh AppAccount#$i 'cd a/b/c; str2=x,y,z'
done
(This won't do anything of course, but I assume your real script has more to it than setting a shell variable and exiting.) The point is that you ned to pass the script you want to run as a parameter to ssh. Otherwise it's going to spawn an interactive shell and wait for you to close it.
Note that if your script is very complicated, it can be very inconvenient to stick it all in a single-quoted string. If your internal script is in its own file, a simple way to handle this is with bash -s which reads a script from stdin:
cat some_script | ssh server 'bash -s'
You can also use bash Here docs to achieve the same thing, but that is likely getting too fancy for this use.

cygwin's ssh-add returns "Could not open a connection to your authentication agent." [duplicate]

I am running into this error of:
$ git push heroku master
Warning: Permanently added the RSA host key for IP address '50.19.85.132' to the list of known hosts.
! Your key with fingerprint b7:fd:15:25:02:8e:5f:06:4f:1c:af:f3:f0:c3:c2:65 is not authorized to access bitstarter.
I tried to add the keys and I get this error below:
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.
Did You Start ssh-agent?
You might need to start ssh-agent before you run the ssh-add command:
eval `ssh-agent -s`
ssh-add
Note that this will start the agent for msysgit Bash on Windows. If you're using a different shell or operating system, you might need to use a variant of the command, such as those listed in the other answers.
See the following answers:
ssh-add complains: Could not open a connection to your authentication agent
Git push requires username and password (contains detailed instructions on how to use ssh-agent)
How to run (git/ssh) authentication agent?.
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent
To automatically start ssh-agent and allow a single instance to work in multiple console windows, see Start ssh-agent on login.
Why do we need to use eval instead of just ssh-agent?
SSH needs two things in order to use ssh-agent: an ssh-agent instance running in the background, and an environment variable set that tells SSH which socket it should use to connect to the agent (SSH_AUTH_SOCK IIRC). If you just run ssh-agent then the agent will start, but SSH will have no idea where to find it.
from this comment.
Public vs Private Keys
Also, whenever I use ssh-add, I always add private keys to it. The file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub looks like a public key, I'm not sure if that will work. Do you have a ~/.ssh/id_rsa file? If you open it in a text editor, does it say it's a private key?
I tried the other solutions to no avail. I made more research and found that the following command worked. I am using Windows 7 and Git Bash.
eval $(ssh-agent)
More information in: https://coderwall.com/p/rdi_wq (web archive version)
The following command worked for me. I am using CentOS.
exec ssh-agent bash
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent
To resolve this error:
bash:
$ eval `ssh-agent -s`
tcsh:
$ eval `ssh-agent -c`
Then use ssh-add as you normally would.
Hot Tip:
I was always forgetting what to type for the above ssh-agent commands, so I created an alias in my .bashrc file like this:
alias ssh-agent-cyg='eval `ssh-agent -s`'
Now instead of using ssh-agent, I can use ssh-agent-cyg
E.g.
$ ssh-agent-cyg
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-n16KsxjuTMiM/agent.32394; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=32395; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
echo Agent pid 32395;
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/my_pk
Original Source of fix:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-10/msg00313.html
MsysGit or Cygwin
If you're using Msysgit or Cygwin you can find a good tutorial at SSH-Agent in msysgit and cygwin and bash:
Add a file called .bashrc to your home folder.
Open the file and paste in:
#!/bin/bash
eval `ssh-agent -s`
ssh-add
This assumes that your key is in the conventional ~/.ssh/id_rsa location. If it isn't, include a full path after the ssh-add command.
Add to or create file ~/.ssh/config with the contents
ForwardAgent yes
In the original tutorial the ForwardAgent param is Yes, but it's a typo. Use all lowercase or you'll get errors.
Restart Msysgit. It will ask you to enter your passphrase once, and that's it (until you end the session, or your ssh-agent is killed.)
Mac/OS X
If you don't want to start a new ssh-agent every time you open a terminal, check out Keychain. I'm on a Mac now, so I used the tutorial ssh-agent with zsh & keychain on Mac OS X to set it up, but I'm sure a Google search will have plenty of info for Windows.
Update: A better solution on Mac is to add your key to the Mac OS Keychain:
ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Simple as that.
Run
ssh-agent bash
ssh-add
To get more details you can search
ssh-agent
or run
man ssh-agent
ssh-add and ssh (assuming you are using the openssh implementations) require an environment variable to know how to talk to the ssh agent. If you started the agent in a different command prompt window to the one you're using now, or if you started it incorrectly, neither ssh-add nor ssh will see that environment variable set (because the environment variable is set locally to the command prompt it's set in).
You don't say which version of ssh you're using, but if you're using cygwin's, you can use this recipe from SSH Agent on Cygwin:
# Add to your Bash config file
SSHAGENT=/usr/bin/ssh-agent
SSHAGENTARGS="-s"
if [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" -a -x "$SSHAGENT" ]; then
eval `$SSHAGENT $SSHAGENTARGS`
trap "kill $SSH_AGENT_PID" 0
fi
This will start an agent automatically for each new command prompt window that you open (which is suboptimal if you open multiple command prompts in one session, but at least it should work).
I faced the same problem for Linux, and here is what I did:
Basically, the command ssh-agent starts the agent, but it doesn't really set the environment variables for it to run. It just outputs those variables to the shell.
You need to:
eval `ssh-agent`
and then do ssh-add. See Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.
Instead of using ssh-agent -s, I used eval `ssh-agent -s` to solve this issue.
Here is what I performed step by step (step 2 onwards on Git Bash):
Cleaned up my .ssh folder at C:\user\<username>\.ssh\
Generated a new SSH key:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "xyz#abc.com"
Check if any process id(ssh agent) is already running.
ps aux | grep ssh
(Optional) If found any in step 3, kill those
kill <pids>
Started the SSH agent
$ eval `ssh-agent -s`
Added SSH key generated in step 2 to the SSH agent
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Try to do the following steps:
Open Git Bash and run: cd ~/.ssh
Try to run agent: eval $(ssh-agent)
Right now, you can run the following command: ssh-add -l
In Windows 10 I tried all answers listed here, but none of them seemed to work. In fact, they give a clue. To solve a problem, simply you need three commands. The idea of this problem is that ssh-add needs the SSH_AUTH_SOCK and SSH_AGENT_PID environment variables to be set with the current ssh-agent sock file path and pid number.
ssh-agent -s > temp.txt
This will save the output of ssh-agent in a file. The text file content will be something like this:
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-kjmxRb2764/agent.2764; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=3044; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
echo Agent pid 3044;
Copy something like "/tmp/ssh-kjmxRb2764/agent.2764" from the text file and run the following command directly in the console:
set SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-kjmxRb2764/agent.2764
Copy something like "3044" from the text file and run the following command directly in the console:
set SSH_AGENT_PID=3044
Now when environment variables (SSH_AUTH_SOCK and SSH_AGENT_PID) are set for the current console session, run your ssh-add command and it will not fail again to connect to ssh agent.
One thing I came across was that eval did not work for me using Cygwin, what worked for me was ssh-agent ssh-add id_rsa.
After that I came across an issue that my private key was too open, the solution I managed to find for that (from here):
chgrp Users id_rsa
as well as
chmod 600 id_rsa
finally I was able to use:
ssh-agent ssh-add id_rsa
For Windows users, I found cmd eval `ssh-agent -s` didn't work, but using Git Bash worked a treat:
eval `ssh-agent -s`; ssh-add KEY_LOCATION
And making sure the Windows service "OpenSSH Key Management" wasn't disabled.
To amplify on n3o's answer for Windows 7...
My problem was indeed that some required environment variables weren't set, and n3o is correct that ssh-agent tells you how to set those environment variables, but doesn't actually set them.
Since Windows doesn't let you do "eval," here's what to do instead:
Redirect the output of ssh-agent to a batch file with
ssh-agent > temp.bat
Now use a text editor such as Notepad to edit temp.bat. For each of the first two lines:
Insert the word "set" and a space at the beginning of the line.
Delete the first semicolon and everything that follows.
Now delete the third line. Your temp.bat should look something like this:
set SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-EorQv10636/agent.10636
set SSH_AGENT_PID=8608
Run temp.bat. This will set the environment variables that are needed for ssh-add to work.
I just got this working. Open your ~/.ssh/config file.
Append the following-
Host github.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github_rsa
The page that gave me the hint Set up SSH for Git
said that the single space indentation is important... though I had a configuration in here from Heroku that did not have that space and works properly.
If you follow these instructions, your problem would be solved.
If you’re on a Mac or Linux machine, type:
eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
If you’re on a Windows machine, type:
ssh-agent -s
I had the same problem on Ubuntu and the other solutions didn't help me.
I finally realized what my problem was. I had created my SSH keys in the /root/.ssh folder, so even when I ran ssh-add as root, it couldn't do its work and kept saying:
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.
I created my SSH public and private keys in /home/myUsername/ folder and I used
ssh-agent /bin/sh
Then I ran
ssh-add /home/myUsername/.ssh/id_rsa
And problem was solved this way.
Note: For accessing your repository in Git, add your Git password when you are creating SSH keys with ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your Git email here".
Let me offer another solution. If you have just installed Git 1.8.2.2 or thereabouts, and you want to enable SSH, follow the well-writen directions.
Everything through to Step 5.6 where you might encounter a slight snag. If an SSH agent is already be running you could get the following error message when you restart bash
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent
If you do, use the following command to see if more than one ssh-agent process is running
ps aux | grep ssh
If you see more than one ssh-agent service, you will need to kill all of these processes. Use the kill command as follows (the PID will be unique on your computer)
kill <PID>
Example:
kill 1074
After you have removed all of the ssh-agent processes, run the px aux | grep ssh command again to be sure they are gone, then restart Bash.
Voila, you should now get something like this:
Initializing new SSH agent...
succeeded
Enter passphrase for /c/Users/username/.ssh/id_rsa:
Now you can continue on Step 5.7 and beyond.
This will run the SSH agent and authenticate only the first time you need it, not every time you open your Bash terminal. It can be used for any program using SSH in general, including ssh itself and scp. Just add this to /etc/profile.d/ssh-helper.sh:
ssh-auth() {
# Start the SSH agent only if not running
[[ -z $(ps | grep ssh-agent) ]] && echo $(ssh-agent) > /tmp/ssh-agent-data.sh
# Identify the running SSH agent
[[ -z $SSH_AGENT_PID ]] && source /tmp/ssh-agent-data.sh > /dev/null
# Authenticate (change key path or make a symlink if needed)
[[ -z $(ssh-add -l | grep "/home/$(whoami)/.ssh/id_rsa") ]] && ssh-add
}
# You can repeat this for other commands using SSH
git() { ssh-auth; command git "$#"; }
Note: this is an answer to this question, which has been merged with this one.
That question was for Windows 7, meaning my answer was for Cygwin/MSYS/MSYS2. This one seems for some Unix, where I wouldn't expect the SSH agent needing to be managed like this.
The basic solution to run ssh-agent is answered in many answers. However runing ssh-agent many times (per each opened terminal or per remote login) will create a many copies ot ssh-agent running in memory. The scripts which is suggested to avoid that problem is long and need to write and/or copy separated file or need to write too many strings in ~/.profile or ~/.schrc. Let me suggest simple two string solution:
For sh, bash, etc:
# ~/.profile
if ! pgrep -q -U `whoami` -x 'ssh-agent'; then ssh-agent -s > ~/.ssh-agent.sh; fi
. ~/.ssh-agent.sh
For csh, tcsh, etc:
# ~/.schrc
sh -c 'if ! pgrep -q -U `whoami` -x 'ssh-agent'; then ssh-agent -c > ~/.ssh-agent.tcsh; fi'
eval `cat ~/.ssh-agent.tcsh`
What is here:
search the process ssh-agent by name and by current user
create appropriate shell script file by calling ssh-agent and run ssh-agent itself if no current user ssh-agent process found
evaluate created shell script which configure appropriate environment
It is not necessary to protect created shell script ~/.ssh-agent.tcsh or ~/.ssh-agent.sh from another users access because: at-first communication with ssh-agent is processed through protected socket which is not accessible to another users, and at-second another users can found ssh-agent socket simple by enumeration files in /tmp/ directory. As far as about access to ssh-agent process it is the same things.
In Windows 10, using the Command Prompt terminal, the following works for me:
ssh-agent cmd
ssh-add
You should then be asked for a passphrase after this:
Enter passphrase for /c/Users/username/.ssh/id_rsa:
Try the following:
ssh-agent sh -c 'ssh-add && git push heroku master'
Use parameter -A when you connect to server, example:
ssh -A root#myhost
from man page :
-A Enables forwarding of the authentication agent connection.
This can also be specified on a per-host basis in a configuration file.
Agent forwarding should be enabled with caution. Users with the ability to bypass file permissions on the remote host (for the agent's
UNIX-domain socket) can access the local agent through the forwarded
connection. An attacker cannot obtain key material from the agent,
however they can perform operations on the keys that enable them to
authenticate using the identities loaded into the agent.
I had this problem, when I started ssh-agent, when it was already running. It seems that the multiple instances conflict with each other.
To see if ssh-agent is already running, check the value of the SSH_AGENT_SOCK environment variable with:
echo $SSH_AGENT_SOCK
If it is set, then the agent is presumably running.
To check if you have more than one ssh-agent running, you can review:
ps -ef | grep ssh
Of course, then you should kill any additional instances that you created.
Read user456814's answer for explanations. Here I only try to automate the fix.
If you using a Cygwin terminal with Bash, add the following to the $HOME/.bashrc file. This only starts ssh-agent once in the first Bash terminal and adds the keys to ssh-agent. (I am not sure if this is required on Linux.)
###########################
# start ssh-agent for
# ssh authentication with github.com
###########################
SSH_AUTH_SOCK_FILE=/tmp/SSH_AUTH_SOCK.sh
if [ ! -e $SSH_AUTH_SOCK_FILE ]; then
# need to find SSH_AUTH_SOCK again.
# restarting is an easy option
pkill ssh-agent
fi
# check if already running
SSH_AGENT_PID=`pgrep ssh-agent`
if [ "x$SSH_AGENT_PID" == "x" ]; then
# echo "not running. starting"
eval $(ssh-agent -s) > /dev/null
rm -f $SSH_AUTH_SOCK_FILE
echo "export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" > $SSH_AUTH_SOCK_FILE
ssh-add $HOME/.ssh/github.com_id_rsa 2>&1 > /dev/null
#else
# echo "already running"
fi
source $SSH_AUTH_SOCK_FILE
Don’t forget to add your correct keys in the "ssh-add" command.
I had a similar problem when I was trying to get this to work on Windows to connect to the stash via SSH.
Here is the solution that worked for me.
Turns out I was running the Pageant ssh agent on my Windows box - I would check what you are running. I suspect it is Pageant as it comes as default with PuTTY and WinSCP.
The ssh-add does not work from command line with this type of agent
You need to add the private key via the Pageant UI window which you can get by double-clicking the Pageant icon in the taskbar (once it is started).
Before you add the key to Pageant you need to convert it to PPK format. Full instructions are available here How to convert SSH key to ppk format
That is it. Once I uploaded my key to stash I was able to use Sourcetree to create a local repository and clone the remote.
For Bash built into Windows 10, I added this to file .bash_profile:
if [ -z $SSH_AUTH_SOCK ]; then
if [ -r ~/.ssh/env ]; then
source ~/.ssh/env
if [ `ps -p $SSH_AGENT_PID | wc -l` = 1 ]; then
rm ~/.ssh/env
unset SSH_AUTH_SOCK
fi
fi
fi
if [ -z $SSH_AUTH_SOCK ]; then
ssh-agent -s | sed 's/^echo/#echo/'> ~/.ssh/env
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/env
source ~/.ssh/env > /dev/null 2>&1
fi
Using Git Bash on Windows 8.1 E, my resolution was as follows:
eval $(ssh-agent) > /dev/null
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
I resolved the error by force stopping (killed) git processes (ssh agent), then uninstalling Git, and then installing Git again.
This worked for me.
In the CMD window, type the following command:
cd path-to-Git/bin # (for example,cd C:\Program Files\Git\bin)
bash
exec ssh-agent bash
ssh-add path/to/.ssh/id_rsa

ssh client (dropbear on a router) does no output when put in background

I'm trying to automate some things on remote Linux machines with bash scripting on Linux machine and have a working command (the braces are a relict from cmd concatenations):
(ssh -i /path/to/private_key user#remoteHost 'sh -c "echo 1; echo 2; echo 3; uname -a"')
But if an ampersand is concatenated to execute it in background, it seems to execute, but no output is printed, neither on stdout, nor on stderr, and even a redirection to a file (inside the braces) does not work...:
(ssh -i /path/to/private_key user#remoteHost 'sh -c "echo 1; echo 2; echo 3; uname -a"') &
By the way, I'm running the ssh client dropbear v0.52 in BusyBox v1.17.4 on Linux 2.4.37.10 (TomatoUSB build on a WRT54G).
Is there a way to get the output either? What's the reason for this behaviour?
EDIT:
For convenience, here's the plain ssh help output (on my TomatoUSB):
Dropbear client v0.52
Usage: ssh [options] [user#]host[/port][,[user#]host/port],...] [command]
Options are:
-p <remoteport>
-l <username>
-t Allocate a pty
-T Don't allocate a pty
-N Don't run a remote command
-f Run in background after auth
-y Always accept remote host key if unknown
-s Request a subsystem (use for sftp)
-i <identityfile> (multiple allowed)
-L <listenport:remotehost:remoteport> Local port forwarding
-g Allow remote hosts to connect to forwarded ports
-R <listenport:remotehost:remoteport> Remote port forwarding
-W <receive_window_buffer> (default 12288, larger may be faster, max 1MB)
-K <keepalive> (0 is never, default 0)
-I <idle_timeout> (0 is never, default 0)
-B <endhost:endport> Netcat-alike forwarding
-J <proxy_program> Use program pipe rather than TCP connection
Amendment after 1 day:
The braces do not hurt, with and without its the same result. I wanted to put the ssh authentication to background, so the -f option is not a solution. Interesting side note: if an unexpected option is specified (like -v), the error message WARNING: Ignoring unknown argument '-v' is displayed - even when put in background, so getting output from background processes generally works in my environment.
I tried on x86 Ubuntu regular ssh client: it works. I also tried dbclient on x86 Ubuntu: works, too. So this problem seems to be specific to the TomatoUSB build - or inside the "dropbear v0.52" was an unknown fix between the build in TomatoUSB and the one Ubuntu provides (difference in help output is just the double-sized default receive window buffer on Ubuntu)... how can a process know if it was put in background? Is there a solution to the problem?
I had the similar problem on my OpenWRT router. Dropbear SSH client does not write anything to output if there is no stdin, e.g. when run by cron. I presume that & has the same effect on process stdin (no input).
I found some workaround on author's bugtracker. Try to redirect input from /dev/zero.
Like:
ssh -i yourkey user#remotehost "echo 123" </dev/zero &
It worked for me as I tried to describe at my blog page.

How can i set a local variable in ssh?

I would like to set a local variable in a ssh command-chain that is only used in this environment:
#!/bin/sh
my_var='/tmp/wrong_file'
ssh user#server "my_var='/tmp/a_file'; cat $my_var;my_var=123;echo $my_var"
echo $my_var
This example the "outer" $my_var is used. How to fix this and use variables "in" the current ssh connection as locally defined? There is no need to change or access the external value '/tmp/wrong_file' in $my_var, as asked in Assign directory listing to variable in bash script over ssh.
You're using the wrong quotes. Parameter expansion is performed inside double quotes, but not inside single quotes.
#!/bin/sh
my_var=/tmp/wrong_file
ssh user#server 'my_var=/tmp/a_file; cat $my_var;my_var=123;echo $my_var'
First of all: The SSH shell and your local shell are completely different and do not exchange any environment variables. This is a good thing - consider environment variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH when using SSH between machines of different OS architecture.
IMHO the best solution for your problem is to encapsulate your commands into a shell script on the remote side, then maybe start it with parameters. E.g.:
Remote:
myscript.sh contains:
#!/bin/sh
MY_FILE="$1";
echo "Contents of §MY_FILE:"
cat $MY_FILE
Local:
RUn something like
export REMOTE_FILE='/path/to/it'
ssh user#server "/path/to/myscript.sh '$REMOTE_FILE'"