Posts Tagged ‘network servers’

How to SSH client Login to server with password provided from command line as a script argument – Running same commands to many Linux servers

Friday, March 6th, 2015

ssh-how-to-login-with-password-provided-from-command-line-use-sshpass-to-run-same-command-to-forest-of-linux-servers

Usually admins like me who casuanlly need to administer "forests" (thousands of identicallyconfigured services Linux servers) are generating and using RSA / DSA key authentication for passwordless login, however this is not always possible as some client environments does prohibit the use of RSA / DSA non-pass authentication, thus in such environments to make routine server basic package rpm / deb upgrades or do other maintanance patching its necessery to use normal ssh user / pass login but as ssh client doesn't allow password to be provided from prompt for security reasons and therefore using some custom bash loop to issue single command to many servers (such as explained in my previous article) requires you to copy / paste password on password prompt multiple times. This works its pretty annoying so if you want to run single command on all your 500 servers with specifying the password from password prompt use sshpass tool (for non-interactive ssh password auth).

SSHPASS official site description:
 

sshpass is a utility designed for running ssh using the mode referred to as "keyboard-interactive" password authentication, but in non-interactive mode.

 

Install sshpass on Debian / Ubuntu (deb based) Linux

sshpass is installable right out of regular repositories so to install run:
 

apt-get install —yes sshpass


Install sshpass on CentOS / Fedora (RPM based) Linux


sshpass is available also across most RPM based distros too so just use yum package manager

 

yum -y install sshpass


If its not available across standard RPM distro provided repositories, there should be RPM on the net for distro just download latest one and use wget and rpm to install:

 wget -q http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/sshpass-1.05-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

 rpm -ivh sshpass-1.05-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

 

How Does SshPass Works?

 

Normally openssh (ssh) client binary uses direct TTY (/dev/tty)= an abbreviation for PhyTeleTYpewriter or (the admin jargon call Physical Console access)  instead of standard remotely defined /dev/ptsVirtual PTY.
To get around this Sshpass runs ssh in a dedicated TTY to emulate the password is indeed issues by interactive keyboard user thus  fooling remote sshd server to thinking password
is provided by interactive user.


SSHPass use

Very basic standard use which allows you to pass the password from command line is like this:
 

sshpass -p 'Your_Password_Goes_here123' ssh username@server.your-server.com


Note that the server you're working is shared with other developers they might be able to steal your username / password by using a simple process list command such as:
 

 ps auxwwef


In my case security is not a hot issue, as I'm the only user on the server (and only concern might be if someone hacks into the server 🙂 

 

Then assuming that you have a plain text file with all your administered servers, you can easily use sshpass in a Bash Script loop in order to run, lets say a package upgrade across all identical Linux version machines:
 

while read line; do
sshpass -p 'Your_Password_Goes_here123' ssh username@$line "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade" < /dev/null;
done < all_servers_list.txt

Change the command you like to issue across all machines with the string "apt-get …"
Above command can be used to keep up2date all Debian stable server packages. What you will do on servers is up to your imaginations, very common use of above line would be if you want to see uptime /netstat command output across all your network servers.

 

while read line; do
sshpass -p 'Your_Password_Goes_here123' ssh username@$line "uptime; who; netstat -tunlp; " < /dev/null;
done < all_servers_list.txt

 


As you can guess SshPass is swiss army knife tool for admins whoneed to automate things with scripts simultaneously across number of servers.
 

Happy SSH-ing 🙂

 

 

 

How to disable IPv6 on Debian / Ubuntu / CentOS and RHEL Linux

Friday, December 9th, 2011

I have few servers, which have automatically enabled IPv6 protocols (IPv6 gets automatically enabled on Debian), as well as on most latest Linux distribituions nowdays.

Disabling IPv6 network protocol on Linux if not used has 2 reasons:

1. Security (It’s well known security practice to disable anything not used on a server)
Besides that IPv6 has been known for few criticil security vulnerabilities, which has historically affected the Linux kernel.
2. Performance (Sometimes disabling IPv6 could have positive impact on IPv4 especially on heavy traffic network servers).
I’ve red people claiming disabling IPv6 improves the DNS performance, however since this is not rumors and did not check it personally I cannot positively confirm this.

Disabling IPv6 on all GNU / Linuces can be achieved by changing the kernel sysctl settings net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 by default net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 equals 1 which means IPv6 is enabled, hence to disable IPv6 I issued:

server:~# sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=0

To set it permanently on system boot I put the setting also in /etc/sysctl.conf :

server:~# echo 'net.ipv6.conf.all.disable = 1 >> /etc/sysctl.conf

The aforedescribed methods should be working on most Linux kernels version > 2.6.27 in that number it should work 100% on recent versions of Fedora, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu.

To disable IPv6 protocol on Debian Lenny its necessery to blackist the ipv6 module in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist by issuing:

echo 'blacklist ipv6' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

On Fedora / CentOS there is a another universal “Redhat” way disable IPv6.

On them disabling IPv6 is done by editting /etc/sysconfig/network and adding:

NETWORKING_IPV6=no
IPV6INIT=no

I would be happy to hear how people achieved disabling the IPv6, since on earlier and (various by distro) Linuxes the way to disable the IPv6 is probably different.
 

Alto to stop Iptables IPV6 on CentOS / Fedora and RHEL issue:

# service ip6tables stop

# service ip6tables off