[Mageia-dev] SSH PAM configuration

Tue Aug 14 23:12:52 CEST 2012

Hello
+On Tuesday 14 August 2012 at 16:56:33, Anne Wilson wrote :
+> > But even without specific setup if you can ssh between hosts
+> > happily, just do "rsync -e ssh"  on the client side and just use
+> > foo at remote:/path/to/files syntax. Job done :)
+> 
+> Sure, but knowing how prone we all are to forget, my intention was to
+> do it by cron :-)
+
+If you want to run rsync over ssh from cron, I know two possible solutions.
+
+The first is to have a passwordless key (not readable by anyone else), then 
+you simply need to use that key when connecting. That is done with the -i 
+switch of ssh, so your rsync command will become
+rsync -e 'ssh -i /path/to/key'
+The problem is that, if you computer is stolen they can use the key as it is 
+unprotected.
+
+The other, more secure solution is to use the ssh agent. You start the agent 
+with -c or -s (depending on your shell) and store its output in a file, and 
+you add the necessary key to the agent (keychain can do that for you, you 
+only have to type the key password). Then from your cron script, you source 
+that file and the agent will be available to the rest of the script.
+The drawback here, is that you must start the agent manually each time the 
+computer is restarted.
+
+Regards
+-- 
+Renaud Michel
+