Anyone who has to administer a lot of *NIX servers has been in the position of needing to execute remote commands on those servers as root. Usually it is done to change a file or run a command. The easy way to do this is to run your command with ssh as the root user but, we all know how bad it is to leave "PermitRootLogin yes" in our sshd_config files. On many systems this is the default setting. But allowing root a remote login through SSH is a security issue so we turn it off. This begs the question what are you to do when you need to execute commands remotely on systems as root but root logins are disabled? It's easier than you think.
Usually when you need to execute these commands it is for a group of servers. To start put your SSH key on all the machines you need to execute your commands on and don't put a password on your key when setting it up. If want to know how to do this look here. After setting those up on your machines you should be able to login to each one without needing a password.
Next, setup sudo so your user can execute commands with root privileges. If you need to know how to do this look here. Here's the short version. As root type "visudo" and put in "yourusername ALL=(ALL) ALL". If your using Ubuntu then this is likely already done for you.
Now with your SSH keys setup and your sudo privs set we are ready. Before you type this command there is a WARNING. This command makes you type your password in cleartext for anyone to see. DON'T type this command in your terminal program because it will stay in your history. DON'T type it on screen because it will stay in your terminals scroll back buffer. The safest way to use this is to make a script, chmod 700 the file, and execute that file. Better yet only type the password in the file right before you need to execute it. Then remove the password from the file when your done. This is still not a super secure way to do this but if remote root is turned off you might not have a choice.
From the machine your going to use to login to your other machines execute the command below. Where it says "hostname" put in the hostname of the machine your trying to get into. Where it says "password" put your password. Where it says "command" put the command your trying to execute like "df -h". As with any command on the command line if there are any special characters you will need to escape them with \ in the bash shell at least. I'll put in an examples with comments below the first line.
# original command ssh hostname "echo password | sudo -S command" # execute command "df -h" with escaped password character ! ssh host.pantz.org "echo PaSSworD\! | sudo -S df -h"
Using SSH and sudo this way works best when the above line is part of a script. This gives you the ability to automate executing the same command across many machines at one time.
Here is a little shell script you might use with the above command. The /home/user/hosts file the script refers to is just a text file with a single host name on each line. It will execute whatever command you give it from the command line for each host in the hosts file. So if you called your script go.sh then you could execute the command "df -h" by typing "./go.sh df -h".
#!/bin/bash
for HOST in $(< /home/user/hosts); do
echo ""
echo "###############"
echo "# HOSTNAME: $HOST"
echo "###############"
# This line is for back grounding each command to execute them on all systems at once
# ssh -q -o ConnectTimeout=3 $HOST "echo password | sudo -S $* >/dev/null 2>&1 &"
ssh -q -o ConnectTimeout=3 $HOST "echo password | sudo -S $*"
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "---- COULD NOT CONNECT TO $HOST ----"
fi
done
Good luck and be careful with this command. Please don't use it from the command line. On some distributions your sudo commands are logged to /var/log/secure but the echo statement with the password does not show up so no worries about that.
This example will show how to convert the OpenSSH key format to ssh.com (Tectia enterprise products) key format. It will also show you how to import the converted keys into ssh.com's Secure File Transfer Client.
1. Copy your private OpenSSH key from your unix system to your local windows machine. The private key is in your home dir ~/.ssh/. Usually it's called id_(something) like id_dsa. I'm going to call mine id_dsa for this example. Make sure your copy the file by transferring it over the network with scp/sftp, shared mount point you have to your your windows machine, or usb key. DO NOT cat the file in a terminal and then copy and paste it into a text editor on the windows machine. This will not work because of the differences in file formats of unix and windows.
2. Go and download Putty. Get the zip version from the website and unzip it. Find the program puttygen.exe in the unzipped files and execute it.
3. Click the "load" button. Select "files of all type" drop down. Then select all files. Point puttygen to your OpenSSH key that you copied over in step 1. Then click "open". Enter your keys pass phrase (If you have one. You should be using pass phrases on your keys.).
4. Click conversions->export->ssh.com key. Then save your converted private key with the name "id_dsa_sshcom". This is your converted private key. Names are important to the ssh.com program when importing keys. The key pair has to have matching names to be imported. You can call it anything you want but it has to take the format: key_name and key_name.pub.
5. Now click file->save public key. Save the public key with the name id_dsa_sshcom.pub in the same area (folder) you saved your private key in step 4. This is your public key that goes with your private key. Make sure the first part of the names match.
6. Open the ssh.com Secure File Transfer Client. Click edit->settings. Then go to user authentication->keys (in the left pane). Click the import button. Select "files of all type" drop down. Then select all files. Click the "Look in" drop down and point it to the folder where your "id_dsa_sshcom.pub" and "id_dsa_sshcom" files are. Select your public key id_dsa_sshcom.pub and click ok. Then ok out of the settings area. FYI: The ssh.com client will ask for the public key and then when it is selected is will match the private key that goes with it by the same name. Just without the .pub at the end.
7. Now you should be able to connect to any host that you have put your public keys on with ssh.com's Secure File Transfer Client.
8. After you have tested your connection make sure you delete your private key you copied over from your system when we started.
I upgraded OpenSSH and X11 forwarding now fails with "X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication". Lets say you upgraded OpenSSH on machine1 and you now try to ssh to machine2 and X11 forward fails. You get the following errors seen below.
user@machine:~$ ssh -X user@machine2
user@machine2's password:
Warning: untrusted X11 forwarding setup failed: xauth key data not generated
Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.
The error you see when trying to open a program expecting X11 forwarding is the following.
user@machine2:~$ xterm
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
X connection to localhost:10.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).
I figured out the problem seems to be trusted X11 forwarding is turned off or disabled. To fix it you have to ssh with the -Y parameter instead of the -X. The other thing you could do is edit your /etc/ssh/ssh_config file on machine1 and set "ForwardX11Trusted" to "yes". Which would look like "ForwardX11Trusted yes".
