I'm trying to use Vim as a substitute for DreamWeavers nice FTP-client sidebar. But I would like for Vim to 'remember' my logins, - so I don't need to get the FTP-address, the username and the password, every time I need to connect to a remote server, to make some changes.
I've made it as far as to figure out, that one can setup a .netrc-file, where you can save login-credentials (and possibly encrypt it using GPG, which I will look into, after I've goten this to work). I can find endless manuals and tutorials about how to setup the .netrc-file, - but no information on how to actually use this .netrc-file.
So if my .netrc-file looks like this:
machine <hostname1>
login <login1>
password <password1>
machine <hostname2>
login <login2>
password <password2>
Then how to I for instance connect to <hostname2>? Do I write vim <hostname2> - and if so, then what if I have several different remote servers on the same host (where the user and password-credentials vary)?
Ideally, I would like to just be able to write something along the lines of
vim ftp://MY_OWN_NICKNAME_FOR_A_REMOTE_SERVER
Whereafter Vim will find the credentials in the .netrc-file and connect me to the given server. How do I do this?
The .netrc file supplies vim with usernames and passwords of remote servers. On the command line, when vim is supplied with a hostname that matches a machine name defined in .netrc, it plugs in the username and password into the url. For example, if I wanted to connect to ftp.server1.com and automatically login I would need to do set up the following in my .netrc file:
$ < .netrc
machine ftp.server1.com login username password "secretpassword"
$ vim ftp://ftp.server1.com/
If I wanted multiple hostnames setup in my .netrc, I would just add a new entry:
$ < .netrc
machine ftp.server1.com login username password "secret password"
machine ftp.server2.com login username password "secretpassword1"
machine ftp.server3.com login different_username password "secretpassword2"
What may be confusing is that you can not alias the hostname. When I first starting using this feature, I thought machine was a variable I could supply -- but this is not the case. That said, a shell aliases will fill-in for vim's lack:
$alias server1=ftp://ftp.server1.com/
$vim $server1
Note: you need that trailing / on the urls to tell vim you're browsing. Also note there are further complications when using a windows os as detailed in :help netrw.
Related
Since I am very used to being prompted for my user-id while using putty or MobaXterm in SSH sessions I expected to have the same behaviour when using SSH in the windows terminal but that is not the case.
If I try it without specifying a user via
ssh <servername>
the command line will just use my windows user which I don't want to, since all of my hosts have too many technical users and entering them on the fly is way simpler for me than creating 3-4 a configs/profiles for each host.
I already tried creating a config file "C:\Users<my-user>.ssh\config" and played around with overwriting the "User" config via making a blank entry like
Host *
User
which obviously didn't work.
Do you think I need to write some sort of wrapper in order to get a proper "login as:" prompt or am I just missing some simple configuration that needs to be adapted?
Luckily I found a solution for this.
When creating a new profile I added the following line as a command:
%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe /c "$login_user = Read-Host -Prompt 'login as'; ssh $login_user#<hostname>"
Replace the "<hostname>" above with whatever server you want to access.
I frequently have to connect to vpn for work. So rather than typing the whole cmd, i want to type something like vpn in terminal and it picks up the password from somewhere and the vpn gets connected.
The process I do now is..
sudo openvpn --config <configfile.ovpn>
I'll be prompted to type the password and when i do that it gets connected.
For the same I explored alias but I suppose alias is for much simpler task. Any solutions, how to pass password automatically when terminal ask for it?
You can create an alias and use it .
In your .bashrc, you can create an alias
alias vpn=« Your command »
Then you will just type the command vpn.
Here a link that can help you
When the password is asked interactively the best options is add the --askpass argument and send the password through a file.
openvpn --config <configfile.ovpn> --askpass <file with cred>
You can also add automatically the password using expect or similar, but the best option is using the own openvpn.
--askpass [file]
Get certificate password from console or file before we daemonize.
For the extremely security conscious, it is possible to protect your private key with a password. Of course this means that every time the OpenVPN daemon is started you must be there to
type the password. The --askpass option allows you to start OpenVPN from the command line. It will query you for a password before it daemonizes. To protect a private key with a password
you should omit the -nodes option when you use the openssl command line tool to manage certificates and private keys.
If file is specified, read the password from the first line of file. Keep in mind that storing your password in a file to a certain extent invalidates the extra security provided by using
an encrypted key.
You can put the password into a file and point your OpenVPN client configuration to it.
It is obviously a bad idea for security to store passwords in plain text on your hard drive!
If you still want to do it, put your user name and password in a plain text file on two lines, like so:
username
password
Add a line
auth-user-pass passwordfile
to your OpenVPN client configuration where passwordfile is the name of the file.
Note this only works in OpenVPN 2 and is no longer supported in version 3. See this blog post about it: https://openvpn.net/blog/openvpn-3-linux-and-auth-user-pass/
My .passwd file contains 2 usernames and 2 passwords.
userNameX:$apr1$F3EFwwfP$W4gD4e/W98FerHQWDErfX0
userNameY:$apr1$Nq21ft8f$CRW4OdeRDVLsLnFwFaXyE0
They have been automatically generated by the old server just providing username and clear password.
Now I have just moved to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk, these two usernames/passwords work very well, but I would like to create more users and passwords. How should I do?
If you want to use htpasswd, look at htpasswd - Options.
There, you have the warning about password on the command line
-b
Use batch mode; i.e., get the password from the command line rather than prompting for it. This option should be used with extreme care, since the password is clearly visible on the command line. For script use see the -i option. Available in 2.4.4 and later.
And the recommended option -i:
-i
Read the password from stdin without verification (for script usage).
This way, you can pass the password through standard input through a pipe (e.g. popen).
You can also look at some authentication module, depending on the language and web framework you use.
I'm trying to edit some files on a remote server with Vim. I've managed this on other servers without trouble in the past, but in this case when I type:
$ vim ftp://username#xxxxxx.com/
I'm prompted for a password, I type it in and I see this:
Name (notixvalet.com:george): User cannot log in.
Please login with USER and PASS.
Please login with USER and PASS.
Please login with USER and PASS.
ftp: Login failed
'george' is my username on my local machine (Mac OS X 10.8.) Vim seems to be ignoring the username I give it and trying to log on as 'george', no matter what I do. To test this I created a new account on my MacBook with the same username as the username on the server I'm trying to log in as, then from that account I can log in fine. This is obviously a VERY hacky solution - how can I connect using the right username from my regular account?
(Incidentally, the username and password I'm using are 100% definitely right - I can use them to connect to the server through an FTP client such as FileZilla.)
The plugin you are using to edit the remote files is netrw, as noted by Ingo in the comments. You can read the plugin help file through :h netrw. In special:
NETRC *netrw-netrc*
The <.netrc> file, typically located in your home directory, contains lines
therein which map a hostname (machine name) to the user id and password you
prefer to use with it.
The typical syntax for lines in a <.netrc> file is given as shown below.
Ftp under Unix usually supports <.netrc>; ftp under Windows usually doesn't.
>
machine {full machine name} login {user-id} password "{password}"
default login {user-id} password "{password}"
Your ftp client must handle the use of <.netrc> on its own, but if the
<.netrc> file exists, an ftp transfer will not ask for the user-id or
password.
Note:
Since this file contains passwords, make very sure nobody else can
read this file! Most programs will refuse to use a .netrc that is
readable for others. Don't forget that the system administrator can
still read the file! Ie. for Linux/Unix: chmod 600 .netrc
Is there any chance that you forgot to copy the ~/.netrc file from the other servers where you can connect without problems? Or it has incorrect permissions, as mentioned on the last paragraph?
I connect to a ftp server with vim and netrc. I don't have the password stored in .netrc because of security.
So when I connect to my server I have to enter the password, which is cooland it works. But if I change the directory, open a file etc. I have to re-enter my password after every action.
Is there a way to have it remember it after entering it once?
I think if you don’t use .netrc, that will work. It will prompt you for your login name as well as the password, though.
If you want to keep your .netrc for other purposes and just not use it in Vim, use
:let g:netrw_ignorenetrc = 1
A better solution, of course, would be to switch to some SSH-based access method. Then you can make use of the SSH agent to evade the whole issue entirely.