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