Re: Connect with null passphrases

Hi,

Maybe this is too obvious and you have already thought of that, but why not use SSH Private/Public key method for connecting without password?

I'll throw out some steps for this (not verified):

1- on the machine that connects to other machines: "$> ssh-keygen -t dsa". Leave the passphrase for the keys empty.

2- two files will be created under "~user/.ssh/": id_dsa and id_dsa.pub on the local machine

3- copy the id_dsa.pub to the remote machines and, under the user that will run the job: "cd ~user/.ssh && cat id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys"

Be sure to check that under the SSH server configuration for remote and local machines (sshd.conf), the option regarding the use of SSH keys is enabled.

--Bernardo

John Stefani wrote:

Hello Everybody,

I have some cron jobs that use ssh (version 4.4p1) to connect to other servers and run certain tasks. The users in question sometimes are real users, sometimes fictitious users that I created only for running the cron job. I changed to *NP* the password field of /etc/shadow for the fictitious users on the servers the cron jobs connect to, and all works happily. Here's my problem: those servers to which the cron job tries to connect to as a real user, who has a real password, does not allow ssh connections with null passphrases. I can't set the password field in /etc/shadow to *NP* because sometimes I have to connect as the real user. Does someone know how I can connect automatically to a server, using ssh, as a user that has a password, but with a null passphrase? Hope the above was not too confusing...

Absolutely any thoughts or workarounds will be much appreciated.

John Stefani
jstefani _at_ yorku.ca


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