clush: support password-based authentication

[thiell]

support password-based authentication for initial connection to nodes

[judovana]

Some update?

[thiell]

Kind of :) If you really want to use password-based authentication with clustershell, you can try sshpass. It is supported in 1.7.1. Please see #241, #242 and #244 and 6e4e131 for the details or just check out this nice doc:

• http://www.getreu.net/public/downloads/doc/Secure_Computer_Cluster_Administration_with_SSH/#distribute-keys-clustershell

[degremont]

As @thiell said, there is a couple of workarounds for this feature.
Anyway, I think we need to support of interactively provided password in future releases.

@thiell: could we imagine, when using a special option (--password?) reading if on the command line, and writing it to each workers?

[kkost]

Support for entering a password for keys with a passphrase would be appreciated too. Doing something like this works around it:

ssh_path: 'sshpass -f plain_text_file_with_password.txt -P Enter ssh'
ssh_options: '-i /some/non-default/key.pem -oBatchMode=no'

...but really defeats the purpose.

[Falkor]

I don't catch why the following approach does not work:

$ export SSHPASS="$(pass [...])"  # use passstore to define the password
# check direct SSH works - OK
$ sshpass -e ssh myserver 'whoami'  
# repeat with clush - Not OK 
$ clush -O ssh_path='sshpass -e ssh' -w myserver 'whoami'
myserver: Permission denied (publickey,password).
clush: myserver: exited with exit code 255

Most likely the SSHPASS variable is not passed to the clush processes. Any suggestion?

[cseraphine]

Whoops, just missed the ten year anniversary of this ticket.

I realize there are situations where you don't like passwords, but in the enterprise there are common tasks that require it. (Example: Installing ssh keys on a few hundred fresh Dells, whose idracs all are hit with root/calvin). This sort of thing is literally the last reason we have expect installed on our servers, and I would love to move past it.