Prevent interactive ssh prompts - authentication

I have an ssh script that uses a local key for login to the remote host - nothing too exciting there. The key is passworded and I usually add it to an agent to avoid prompting.
Occasionally I run the program before the agent is running and it will hang waiting for the unlock phrase. In such cases, rather than prompt interactively, I want the command to simply fail.
Anyone know if there's an option for this?

Sure is.
ssh REMOTE_HOST -o "BatchMode yes"

Related

why yes command not working in git clone?

i am trying to run script that clone repository and then build it in my docker.
And it is a private repository so i have copied ssh keys in docker.
but seems like below command does not work.
yes yes | git clone (ssh link to my private repository.)
When i manually tried to run script in my local system its showing the same.but it works fine for other commands.
I have access of repository as i can type yes and it works.
But i can't type yes in docker build.
Any help will be appreciated.
This is purely an ssh issue. When ssh is connecting to a host for the "first time",1 it obtains a "host fingerprint" and prints it, then opens /dev/tty to interact with the human user so as to obtain a yes/no answer about whether it should continue connecting. You cannot defeat this by piping to its standard input.
Fortunately, ssh has about a billion options, including:
the option to obtain the host fingerprint in advance, using ssh-keyscan, and
the option to verify a host key via DNS.
The first is the one to use here: run ssh-keyscan and create a known_hosts file in the .ssh directory. Security considerations will tell you how careful to be about this (i.e., you must decide how paranoid to be).
1"First" is determined by whether there's a host key in your .ssh/known_hosts file. Since you're spinning up a Docker image that you then discard, every time is the first time. You could set up a docker image that has the file already in it, so that no time is the first time.

Calling SSH command from Jenkins

Jenkins keeps using the default "jenkins" user when executing builds. My build requires a number of SSH calls. However these SSH calls fails with Host verification exceptions because i haven't been able connect place the public key for this user on the target server.
I don't know where the default "jenkins" user is configured and therefore cant generate the required public key to place on the target server.
Any suggestions for either;
A way to force Jenkins to use a user i define
A way to enable SSH for the default Jenkins user
Fetch the password for the default 'jenkins' user
Ideally I would like to be able do both both any help greatly appreciated.
Solution: I was able access the default Jenkins user with an SSH request from the target server. Once i was logged in as the jenkins user i was able generate the public/private RSA keys which then allowed for password free access between servers
Because when having numerous slave machine it could be hard to anticipate on which of them build will be executed, rather then explicitly calling ssh I highly suggest using existing Jenkins plug-ins for SSH executing a remote commands:
Publish Over SSH - execute SSH commands or transfer files over SCP/SFTP.
SSH - execute SSH commands.
The default 'jenkins' user is the system user running your jenkins instance (master or slave). Depending on your installation this user can have been generated either by the install scripts (deb/rpm/pkg etc), or manually by your administrator. It may or may not be called 'jenkins'.
To find out under what user your jenkins instance is running, open the http://$JENKINS_SERVER/systemInfo, available from your Manage Jenkins menu.
There you will find your user.home and user.name. E.g. in my case on a Mac OS X master:
user.home /Users/Shared/Jenkins/Home/
user.name jenkins
Once you have that information you will need to log onto that jenkins server as the user running jenkins and ssh into those remote servers to accept the ssh fingerprints.
An alternative (that I've never tried) would be to use a custom jenkins job to accept those fingerprints by for example running the following command in a SSH build task:
ssh -o "StrictHostKeyChecking no" your_remote_server
This last tip is of course completely unacceptable from a pure security point of view :)
So one might make a "job" which writes the host keys as a constant, like:
echo "....." > ~/.ssh/known_hosts
just fill the dots from ssh-keyscan -t rsa {ip}, after you verify it.
That's correct, pipeline jobs will normally use the user jenkins, which means that SSH access needs to be given for this account for it work in the pipeline jobs. People have all sorts of complex build environments so it seems like a fair requirement.
As stated in one of the answers, each individual configuration could be different, so check under "System Information" or similar, in "Manage Jenkins" on the web UI. There should be a user.home and a user.name for the home directory and the username respectively. On my CentOS installation these are "/var/lib/jenkins/" and "jenkins".
The first thing to do is to get a shell access as user jenkins in our case. Because this is an auto-generated service account, the shell is not enabled by default. Assuming you can log in as root or preferably some other user (in which case you'll need to prepend sudo) switch to jenkins as follows:
su -s /bin/bash jenkins
Now you can verify that it's really jenkins and that you entered the right home directory:
whoami
echo $HOME
If these don't match what you see in the configuration, do not proceed.
All is good so far, let's check what keys we already have:
ls -lah ~/.ssh
There may only be keys created with the hostname. See if you can use them:
ssh-copy-id user#host_ip_address
If there's an error, you may need to generate new keys:
ssh-keygen
Accept the default values, and no passphrase, if it prompts you to add the new keys to the home directory, without overwriting existing ones. Now you can run ssh-copy-id again.
It's a good idea to test it with something like
ssh user#host_ip_address ls
If it works, so should ssh, scp, rsync etc. in the Jenkins jobs. Otherwise, check the console output to see the error messages and try those exact commands on the shell as done above.

still asking for password even after setting up the machine for Password-less SSH Login

I need to copy a file from a remote machine to my local machine and I need to automate it.
I've tried SCP command and it's working, however, I could not automate the part wherein it is asking for the password of the user of the local machine and the remote machine.
Based on this article I can Perform SSH Login Without Password Using ssh-keygen & ssh-copy-id
after following all the instructions written there, I tried to access the remote machine using this
ssh lalala#XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
it works, it doesnt ask for the password anymore. But when I tried copying a file from that machine using the command below,
scp lalala#XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:'/a/b/c.txt' lelele#XXX.XXX.XXX.YYY:'/b/c/'
it still asks for the password of the localmachine which is the lelele#XXX.XXX.XXX.YYY
I wonder if I did something wrong? what could it be? is there something wrong with the format of the command?
BTW, im using Centos, and I'm planning to code it using python
If you are copying to your local machine why don't you just do
scp lalala#XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:'/a/b/c.txt' /b/c/
?
I tried your line on some machine with similar setup and didn't get asked for password; I got an error instead, but this is probably due to differences in our configurations. I tried mine and it worked.
Regarding whether your connection succeeds in the remote machine you could tail this file there:
tail -f /var/log/secure
If you see no error there you can be sure (well, never say always) your layout with the generated keys is working.
In this case I bet you'll see no error there
I think you may have multiple ssh keys and set identies only as yes. If so, please check this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/999306/398861

Limit SSH - bash with no commands

So I have been working on this for some time. Would like to know if there is a better way or if I am on the right track.
I would basically like to allow some users to login to my server via SSH and then have a squid tunnel via that SSH connection.
The tricky part however is that I dont want these users to be able to execute ANY commands. I mean NOTHING at all.
So at this stage I have setup a Jail via - jailkit. The specific user is then placed in the jail and given the bash shell as a shell.
The next step would be to remove all the commands in the /jail/bin/ directories etc so that they are not able to execute any commands.
Am I on the right path here? What would you suggest?
Also...I see that it will give them many command not found errors...how do I remove these.
Is there any other shell I could look at giving them that would not let them do anything?
You could set their shell to something like /bin/true, or maybe a simple script that will output an informational message, and then have them logon using ssh -N (see the ssh manual page). I believe that allows them to use portforwarding without having an actuall shell on the system.
EDIT:
The equivalent of ssh -N in PuTTY is checking the "Don't start a shell or command at all" checkbox in its SSH configuration tab (Connection->SSH).
EDIT2:
As an alternative to this you could use a script that enters an infinite sleep loop. Until it is interrupted using Ctrl-C the connection will remain alive. I just tried this:
#!/bin/sh
echo "DNSH: Do-Nothing Shell"
while sleep 3600; do :; done
If you use this as a shell (preferrably with a more helpful message) your users will be able to use port-forwarding without an actual shell and without having to know about ssh -N and friends.

How to use ssh command in shell script?

I know that we shuld do
ssh user#target
but where do we specify the password ?
Hmm thanks for all your replies.
My requirement is I have to start up some servers on different machines. All servers should be started with one shell script. Well, entering password every time seems little bad but I guess I will have to resort to that option. One reason why I don't want to save the public keys is I may not connect to same machines every time. It is easy to go back and modify the script to change target addresses though.
The best way to do this is by generating a private/public key pair, and storing your public key on the remote server. This is a secure way to login w/o typing in a password each time.
Read more here
This cannot be done with a simple ssh command, for security reasons. If you want to use the password route with ssh, the following link shows some scripts to get around this, if you are insistent:
Scripts to automate password entry
The ssh command will prompt for your password. It is unsafe to specify passwords on the commandline, as the full command that is executed is typically world-visible (e.g. ps aux) and also gets saved in plain text in your command history file. Any well written program (including ssh) will prompt for the password when necessary, and will disable teletype echoing so that it isn't visible on the terminal.
If you are attempting to execute ssh from cron or from the background, use ssh-agent.
The way I have done this in the past is just to set up a pair of authentication keys.
That way, you can log in without ever having to specify a password and it works in shell scripts. There is a good tutorial here:
http://linuxproblem.org/art_9.html
SSH Keys are the standard/suggested solution. The keys must be setup for the user that the script will run as.
For that script user, see if you have any keys setup in ~/.ssh/ (Key files will end with a .pub extension)
If you don't have any keys setup you can run:
ssh-keygen -t rsa
which will generate ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (the -t option has other types as well)
You can then copy the contents of this file to ~(remote-user)/.ssh/authorized_keys on the remote machine.
As the script user, you can test that it works by:
ssh remote-user#remote-machine
You should be logged in without a password prompt.
Along the same lines, now when your script is run from that user, it can auto SSH to the remote machine.
If you really want to use password authentication , you can try expect. See here for an example