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List:       gentoo-dev
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-dev] SSH password authentication support for cvs.eclass
From:       Jeremy Maitin-Shepard <jbms () gentoo ! org>
Date:       2003-12-29 4:36:52
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Nick Jones <carpaski@twobit.net> writes:

>> Additionally, dealing with the SSH known hosts file is somewhat of a
>> problem.  If no additional options are passed to SSH, in many cases it
>> is expected that the user would not have added the keys for the relevant
>> host to /root/.ssh/known_hosts before running the ebuild command; thus,
>> the client would not allow the connection.

> You can write an interface inbetween the eclass and ssh using popen and
> forktty. I did this for work. It's fairly aggitating to do, but does
> work. forktty opens master and slave pty's and you use the master as
> the stderr pipe that communicates with ssh for the password and the
> host messages. The data you have to do close() and dup() operations
> to get them forwarded to the interface's stdout and stdin.

I don't quite see how this would do anything better than what I am
currently doing.  The issue is not specifying to SSH to ignore that the
host is not in the known_hosts file -- that can be done using a simple
-oStrictHostKeyChecking=no.  The issue is that if special care is not
taken, the key is then added to the user's personal known_hosts file,
which is probably undesirable.  As I state in the message, the solution
I employ is to use a temporary known_hosts file.  This works fine,
except that if the user has specified an alternative location for the
known_hosts file in his ssh_config file, the eclass will not copy the
alternative file to the temporary location, and so if the user did in
fact have the hosts' key in his known_hosts file in an alternative
location, the key would not be checked, when ideally it would.  All in
all though, that seems like a very minor problem.

-- 
Jeremy Maitin-Shepard

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