ssh-copy-id behavior
Posted: 17 October 2011 Filed under: system administration | Tags: command line, ssh, ssh-copy-id Leave a commentKeep an eye out for this one. When using ssh-copy-id to copy my public key to a remote host, I found that it had not properly appended my id to the remote ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. It concatenated it on to the end, with no linefeed. Just be sure to check for that!
Original remote ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
ssh-dss AAA...== forest@machine
After ssh-copy-id did its work:
ssh-dss AAA...== forest@machinessh-dss AAAAB...gdA== forest@laptop
SSH public RSA key errors
Posted: 5 October 2011 Filed under: system administration | Tags: command line, pki, ssh, system administration 4 CommentsSeen these before when trying to login via SSH with your new RSA public key?
Nov 2 12:09:17 hostname sshd[12712]: error: buffer_get_ret: trying to get more bytes 257 than in buffer 73
Nov 2 12:09:17 hostname sshd[12712]: error: buffer_get_string_ret: buffer_get failed
Nov 2 12:09:17 hostname sshd[12712]: error: buffer_get_bignum2_ret: invalid bignum
Nov 2 12:09:17 hostname sshd[12712]: error: key_from_blob: can't read rsa key
Nov 2 12:09:17 hostname sshd[12712]: error: key_read: key_from_blob AAAAB3N[...] failed
In my case these were the result of copying a public key from e-mail, which tends to mangle long text lines. I usually don’t have this problem because I use the ssh-copy-id script to copy my keys to a remote host before attempting to log in.
sftp chroot jail in Ubuntu
Posted: 11 January 2010 Filed under: system administration, ubuntu | Tags: command line, sftp, ssh, system administration, ubuntu 9 Comments(Update 16 Mar 2011: Since writing this post, I’ve learned of an easier way to create this chroot jail. Newer versions of OpenSSH enable the “ChrootDirectory” configuration directive. I recommend that you take a look at George Ornbo’s tutorial on chrooting sftp users in Intrepid for the details.)
(Updated 08 Feb 2011 to reflect xplicit’s experience on Ubuntu 10.04.)
I wanted to give a buddy access to a website hosted on my box. So I tried scponly
, since I only wanted to provide SFTP access to that particular directory, using a chroot
jail. The steps are as follows.
- Install the scponly package using Ubuntu’s APT package management system.
- Use the script provided to set up your first jail and your user’s home directory. For the location of the user’s jail, give the path of the directory you want to share.
- Provide a password for the new user.
- Ensure that the new user has permissions to read and write all the necessary directories in your Web site.
$ sudo apt-get install scponly
$ gzip -dc /usr/share/doc/scponly/setup_chroot/setup_chroot.sh.gz > /tmp/setup_chroot.sh
$ cp /usr/share/doc/scponly/setup_chroot/config.h /tmp
The previous step copies the “config.h” file to help things go more smoothly, as Luke found.
$ chmod +x /tmp/setup_chroot.sh
$ cd /tmp
$ sudo ./setup_chroot.sh
Next we need to set the home directory for this scponly user.
please note that the user's home directory MUST NOT be writeable
by the scponly user. this is important so that the scponly user
cannot subvert the .ssh configuration parameters.
For this reason, a writeable subdirectory will be created that
the scponly user can write into.
Note that I removed the /incoming subdirectory created by this script. There was no need for a separate directory for my buddy to upload files. He could have permissions over the whole site tree.
-en Username to install [scponly]
bob
-en home directory you wish to set for this user [/home/bob]
/var/www/sites/bobsite/htdocs
-en name of the writeable subdirectory [incoming]
-e
creating /var/www/sites/bobsite/htdocs/incoming directory for uploading files
Your platform (Linux) does not have a platform specific setup script.
This install script will attempt a best guess.
If you perform customizations, please consider sending me your changes.
Look to the templates in build_extras/arch.
- joe at sublimation dot org
please set the password for bob:
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
if you experience a warning with winscp regarding groups, please install
the provided hacked out fake groups program into your chroot, like so:
cp groups /var/www/sites/bobsite/htdocs/bin/groups
This script added certain directories to the site root (/var/www/sites/bobsite/htdocs
). Every other directory needed to be writable by Bob. So let’s add Bob to a special group, and allow that group write access on all the website’s files.
$ sudo adduser bob www-data
We can ignore /bin
, /etc
, /lib
and other directories added to the chroot jail (the website filesystem):
$ sudo find . \! -user root -exec chgrp www-data \{\} \;
$ sudo find . \! -user root -exec chmod g+w \{\} \;
Good to go!