Hi all,

I have a situation where I have a shell script that I need to run remotely on multiple *nix machines via SSH. Unfortunately, some of the commands in it require root access. I know that best practices for ssh entail configuring it so that the root account cannot log in, you need to elevate to root via su after logging in with a regular account.

Unfortunately, this seems to leave me in a dilemma: How in a script can I elevate to root, since it will prompt me for a password that I will not be there to enter? Or, is there some other alternative from an advanced security perspective that will allow me to log in with an account that has root level access to the machine (but isn't the actual "root" account)?

Finally, just to head this off: No, I cannot set the script up in crontab to run as root at a certain time/frequency. The requirements for this script to run is: 1) SCP it to /var/tmp; 2) Execute via SSH as root or root-equivalent; 3) scrape the output; 4) Execute "rm /var/tmp/script.sh" via SSH to remove it.

Any suggestions?