UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hi All,

Hoping someone can help with something I'm sure is an easy fix. I'm trying to setup a cron to ssh to a server and check if a process is running. I've got keys setup from the jumpbox which I'm originating the check from (I don't have root privileges), when running the check manually from the just box it has no issue logging works perfectly however when logging in during the cron process it fails. It keeps prompting with the below

Code:

Permission denied, please try again.
Permission denied, please try again.
Permission denied (publickey,password).

I'm just using the standard ssh login string in the cron

Code:

ssh user1@10.0.2.1

Could anyone advise if they have any expierence with this. I mean i know the keys work as its fine when doing it from my shell.

Thanks

This is untested: cron provides a very limited environment, so ssh may fail to find the keys file in ~/.ssh. You can try to run ssh in verbose mode by adding one or more -v options.

Are the keys passphraseless? It looks to me as though ssh is waiting on the passphrase then goes to password. If the keys are loaded into an ssh session on the just box you won't need to enter the passphrase when running the script manually, but the cron job will not be running in that session.

Andrew

In addition to what the others already pointed out: it might be that your connection needs a terminal and doesn't have one from the cron-initiated session. If you want to use ssh as a sort of rexec-replacement, you might want to do it this way:

Code:

ssh -nqo 'BatchMode = yes' "<user>@<host>" "<your-command>"

I hope this helps.

bakunin