UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hi gurus,

I am NOT the SA of the servers so very limited on what I can do. Basically the scenario is like this:

Every 6 months our password expires and we have to reset them to comply to some password rules. Thing is users, me included, tend to have plaintext copy of this difficult to remember password and copy and paste when we use PuTTY to ssh to the servers. There is about 20+ servers and we've been provided a passmass expect script to use whenever we need to do a password reset.

passmass works fine, it does the job in so far as password resetting to all servers is concern. Remembering the very difficult password however is a challenge. I use KeePass at the moment to save the password and copy and paste to PuTTY. We don't always ahve KeePass, so I want to save the password in one of the servers. I am thinking of creating a text file and openssl encrypt/decrypt and copy and paste the password every time I need to access my current password. I can't think of any other way but I am sure may be I just don't know that there is a better way out there somewhere, hence I am posting this to the forum.

Question is, does generating ssh keys and placing it in all the servers make it easier so that I don't have to supply the password when I ssh to each server? Do I have to update the ssh keys as well every so often whenever I do a password reset which means I have to manually copy it to all the 20+ servers? Or maybe there is a way that I can store the password in PuTTY?

Please advise. Thanks in advance.

Just move to password-less SSH using shared crypto keys and be happy and more secure too!

If you know credentials to access each server, then you should be able to create an SSH key-pair locally and put the public key on each server.

Do you know how to do this? There are various threads on this board to help you. You can probably find many by searching for passwordless


Kind regards,
Robin