Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Experts,

I have specific requirement where I want to pass the password with the

Code:

ssh username@hostname command .

I dont want to use RSA public and private keys also. Because that will be on production server and no one wants to give access like that.
Second thing it is production servers, We dont want to install any utilities like SSHPASS or expect.

I am lookin for the solution where I can pass it password directly in the command or can read it from one file.

Thanks

As far as i know the whole idea of SSH is dont use or automate password to it. Thats whythey have SSHPASS and except tools to achieve this.

Yeah Agree to you.

But requirement is like I dont have the permission to install any utilities or generating the RSA certificate authentication. In this case do we have any way to pass the password within the script?

In such scenarios, production environment required some rights which generally developer doesnot have it. So how to bypass this thing and directly hardcode the password in the script or read it from some file.

Thanks again. Anyone faced this kind of problem or having any resolution for the same?

So are you saying that you cannot (on the local system) issue ssh-keygen

If you can, can you use SFTP (with user & passwd) to the target server? If it's a unix server, then normally you would need to edit ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and add in the newly generated public key. If it's Windoze, then I'm a bit stuck.

SSH is designed for key exchange really, with user & password being a manual process only. There are ways, but you are then exposing the credentials to anyone who can read the script. I doubt that meets your security and auditing requirements.

Can you elaborate on why you (or the sysadmin of the other server if it's not you) don't want to use keys?




I hope that this helps,
Robin,
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

If you're not allowed to use the safe, secure, normal, day-to-day method of automatic login, it's pretty safe to assume your admin did not intend you to use some wildly insecure kludge to do so instead.

Yes Rbatte, Here is the explaination.

We have unix boxes in the production which are being replicated on other boxes for disaster recovery. So the script which am writing actually need to run on the DR site. First thing is we wont be having access to install anything on the DR servers and we need to perform immediate test using script. If we issue key certificate also for production servers as it will be replicated to DR servers so the IP and hosts will change for DR. So your key certificates wont work in DR site.

So what solution I was thinking is just passing the password from the scripts only and run using SSH to multiple servers. I agree that SSH keys provide the safe and secure mechanism but sometime more security become bottleneck for straight forward solution.

I appericiate you guys for sticking to standards and guidelines but i need some solution out of the box here.

why not just generate 1 key each for each server in a production-dr server pair inside the ssh keys file? that way replication from production to dr will not clobber the dr servers' ssh key files in any way ...