OpenSSH on Cygwin - cygwin

I have a Linux box (Ubuntu Server 13.04) which needs to run a job on a Windows 7 box (with cygwin installed) under a specific user's account. I have set up a password-less login to access the Windows machine through openSSH.
The problem I face is the following: when I manually ssh into the Win7 machine and launch the job everything is fine. However, when I launch the job using ssh winuser#winmachine command, I end up connecting to the Windows machine under the privileged sshd user 'cyg_server':
$ whoami
linuxuser
$ ssh winuser#Win7
$ whoami
winuser
$ exit
$ ssh winuser#Win7 "whoami; exit"
cyg_server
>> This should be 'winuser' too.
Why could this be happening? I have tried running ssh-host-config again to no avail. I don't see what parameters might influence this in sshd_config either.
Any help is greatly appreciated!

I had similar issues when I was connecting to a Cygwin machine using SSH. I used to have no problems logging on until one day I noticed that my path wasn't set correctly. I spent ages recreating the configuration files with ssh-host-config only to find my answer in the man page for ssh:
If command is specified, it is executed on the remote host instead of
a login shell.
The problem was the alias I had used to connect to the machine had been changed to connect to a screen session automatically (screen -DR). That meant that if there wasn't already a screen session to attach to, screen was not being run as a child process of a user login shell and not inheriting any of the relevant user environment.
When you provide a command as an argument to ssh, the resulting command is run as a process started by cyg_server. Ensuring the SSH command is being run as part of a login shell should do what you want:
ssh winuser#Win7 "bash -l -c 'whoami; exit'"
Explanation (from the bash man page):
-c string If the -c option is present, then commands are read from string.
-l Make bash act as if it had been invoked as a login shell.

Related

Using ssh to login to linux terminal from windows and run command in a logged in shell

First of all, this may seem like a duplicate question but I have searched stack overflow/various other forum sites and still haven't managed to find a solution.
A few example forum posts I have reviewed to prove I've done my research before asking a question:
https://superuser.com/questions/130443/remotely-run-script-on-unix-get-output-locally
https://linuxconfig.org/executing-commands-remotely-with-ssh-and-output-redirection
https://zaiste.net/posts/few-ways-to-execute-commands-remotely-ssh/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/474533/get-output-of-this-command-from-another-server-via-ssh
Run ssh and immediately execute command
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-linux-execute-command-using-ssh/
There's hundreds more but I won't include them all.
I essentially need a shell script to open a command prompt on windows, login to a remote linux system and run a command.
I am aware this can be done with the following:
start cmd /k ssh user#host ls
But the problem with the above is that the ssh connection is closed upon completion of the task.
I am also aware I can keep the ssh connection open by adding:
bash -l
in some cases.
For my use case, I need to run a launch file for ROS (robot operating system) and for this I need to see the output from the command.
And when attempting to run roslaunch launchFile.launch (in place of ls above):
start cmd /k ssh user#host "roslaunch launchFile.launch"
the command prompt returns
bash: roslaunch: command not found
I've obviously sanitised the specific name of my launch file but
roslaunch launchFile.launch
runs perfectly if I login to the linux PC first:
ssh user#host
then run the command.
I have achieved this exact use case on MacOS but I now need reimplement the same solution on windows:
osascript -e 'tell app "Terminal"
do script "ssh quantum#172.23.199.1 \n
roslaunch launchFile.launch"
end tell'
Thanks in advance for any help or advice.
Try this :
start cmd /k ssh user#host "/full/path/to/roslaunch launchFile.launch; exec /bin/bash"

Issuing Command Via SSH Prompts for Password

I'm having an issue with a script used in a project I inherited that has little to no documentation, and am in the process of documenting everything. I'm trying to debug an issue with one line of a script that is executed on the host machine to call out to a LAN-attached Raspberry Pi with SSH to return some information about the Pi.
We already have working versions of this Raspberry Pi which can execute the script without issue, and I'm not sure what the difference is. When executed on the new one, it prompts for the root password on the Pi, but it has not done this on previous versions of the device. I assume it has something to do with the SSH configuration but I don't know enough about SSH to say what would be the cause.
The line in particular causing the issue is:
ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no {host_name} uname -a &>/dev/null
rc=$? #gets the return value of the remote command so we can read the uname info
{host_name} of course is the actual host name it's connecting to, but I've left that part out for privacy reasons. The script is the same on both machines.
Both Pi devices are the same model and I'm having trouble narrowing down what could cause me to not be able to execute this command. Does anyone know what I need to configure in order to be able to execute this command on the Pi remotely?
Quick fix:
sshpass -p 'password' ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no user#server
Detailed fix:
Most likely you would need to set up Async keys (public/Private) for proper passwordless login. Your command does not show you are using keys so I'm assuming you are not (e.g. -A or -i /path/to/key). Generally root user is blocked (I guess not your problem), I would set up another user for this or change sshd config. You could also Compare the sshd configurations between the Pi Boxes.
See: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/ssh/passwordless.md
Okay, so after some more digging around, I discovered that there was a separate .ssh directory under /root that contained an authorized_keys file. After copying this to the new Pi, it worked. I had been wondering all this time if there was a separate config folder for root, but I've never gone digging around /root, so I wasn't aware that it was there.

SSH and run commands mid-script

I'm writing a bash script to setup a GRE Tunnel, on both local and a remote machine.
How would I be able to (in the middle of the script) be able to have a piece of code that logs into the remote machine, runs the required iptables commands, and logs out, then continues with the setup on the LOCAL machine?
If the client machine is running bash as well, and has the OpenSshClient installed: you can just run ssh user#host yourCommandToRunWithoutPty. This runs the command WITHOUT a pty/tty, which is important is some cases, such as sudo (sudo expects a tty to ask for password).
Because of this, I would suggest adding passwordless access to that command by that user in your server's /etc/sudoers, if (securely!) possible.
If configured correctly, your client should be able to just run ssh user#host sudo iptables --some-iptables-switches.
NOTE When adding passwordless commands to your /etc/sudoers, remember to always be as explicit as possible with your arguments, so no one can abuse arguments unintented to be ran without a sudo password.

node.js unavailable via ssh

I am trying to call an installation of node.js on a remote server running Ubuntu via SSH. Node has been installed via nvm.
SSHing in and calling node works just fine:
user#localmachine:~$ ssh user#remoteserver
(Server welcome text)
user#remoteserver:~$ which node
/home/user/.nvm/v0.10.00/bin/node
However if I combine it into one line:
user#localmachine:~$ ssh user#remoteserver "which ls"
/bin/ls
user#localmachine:~$ ssh user#remoteserver "which node"
No sign of node, so I tried sourcing .bashrc and waiting 10 seconds:
user#localmachine:~$ ssh user#remoteserver "source ~/.bashrc; sleep 10; which node"
Only node seems affected by this. One thing I did notice was that if I ssh in and then check which shell I'm in it says -bash whilst if I ssh direct it gives me /bin/bash. I tried running the commands inside a bash login shell:
user#localmachine:~$ ssh user#remoteserver 'bash --login -c "which node"'
Still nothing.
Basically my question is: Why isn't bash finding my node.js installation when I call it non-interactively from SSH?
Another approach is to run bash in interactive mode with the -i flag:
user#localmachine:~$ ssh user#remoteserver "bash -i -c 'which node'"
/home/user/.nvm/v0.10.00/bin/node
$ ssh user#remoteserver "which node"
When you run ssh and specify a command to be run on the remote system, ssh by default doesn't allocate a PTY (pseudo-TTY) for the session. Not having a TTY causes your remote shell process (ie, bash) to initialize as a non-interactive session instead of an interactive session. This can alter how it interprets your initialization files--.bashrc, .bash_profile, and so on.
The actual problem is probably that the line which adds /home/user/.nvm/v0.10.00/bin to your command PATH isn't executing for non-interactive sessions. There are two ways to resolve this:
Find the command in your initialization file(s) which adds /home/user/.nvm/v0.10.00/bin to your command path, figure out why it's not running for non-interactive sessions, and correct it.
Run ssh with the -t option. This tells it to allocate a PTY for the remote session. Or add the line RequestTTY yes to your .ssh/config file on the local host.

how to write expect script to login and run command on remote box

i wanted to execute commands on remote linux box from windows and also wanted to collect result of executed command. Basically i have to pass 2 boxes to execute that command here is flow.
Login to a box
ssh to another box
run command
collect output of command locally (in file)
I tried following
F:\xyz>plink xyz#a1.b1.com -i F:\x\y\PRIVATEKEY.ppk -pw xyz
ssh -f root#166.1.8.1 yum upgrade Cyberc
but this is asking for password. I can do it by adding id_rsa.pub value in to authorized_keys but we dont have permission to do. So instead of that i wanted to write EXPECT script to pass user/pass and commands to complete my job.
Any help on EXPECT script would be much appreciated.
Unless the program on the remote linux host is interactive (i.e. it has prompts that the user must respond to), then you probably don't need to use expect - you can simply use plink to connect to the remote Linux host from your windows machine and run the command. You can specify the username and password to authenticate with the remote host in the plink command. See the following links for more info:
http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.58/htmldoc/Chapter7.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12844944/login-syntax-for-plink-using-ip-username-and-password

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