Re: [Fab-user] Initiating a 3rd party SSH connection using run()

[Jordan Levy]

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 20:59 -0400, Jeff Forcier wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Jordan Levy wrote:
> 
> > I have ForwardAgent setup on my local machine so that initiating an SSH
> > session to host1, then to host2 from host1, works just fine without
> > providing a password. I'm assuming that Fabric does not use
> > ForwardAgent? This would be fine if I were at least prompted for a
> > password during the operation.
> 
> Hi Jordan,
> 
> I can't answer 100% conclusively, but I don't *think* Fabric currently
> honors ForwardAgent (or, for that matter, anything else in
> .ssh/config*). I've just trawled all over the place looking to see if
> anyone's gotten Paramiko (our SSH substrate) doing this and didn't
> find anything. Ditto for Twisted Conch (a potential replacement).
> 
> It does look like Ruby's Net-SSH library supports agent forwarding,
> but that doesn't exactly help us any over here :( I'm guessing that,
> assuming I'm not missing something, the dev(s) on that lib had more
> need for the feature (or time to implement it) than the
> Paramiko/Twisted devs.
> 
> If anyone can chime in on this with more info or a "you're wrong,
> Jeff, and here's why", that'd be great, otherwise you're probably out
> of luck until someone patches one of those libs. (If you have the time
> and want to specifically ping e.g. the Paramiko list about this, feel
> free.)
> 
> Best,
> Jeff
> 
> * Parsing .ssh/config, in general, is possible with both libs, so I
> would like to eventually work in HostName/User support at the very
> least. But ForwardAgent is likely to be a bigger fish to fry, and
> (IMHO) more of an edge case, so I'm not sure it's something I have
> time to tackle myself, even if it is something we could do at our
> level instead of needing to be in Paramiko itself.

Thanks for the answer Jeff. By the time I received it I had already dug
into paramiko and Fabric's use of it. It seemed like paramiko did not
provide any support for ForwardAgent. This is unfortunate because I
think my use case is a common one.

However, I was able to find a simple workaround for my case. It's not
ideal, but it works:


config.basedir = '/path/to/put/repo/at/'
local_per_host('ssh $(fab_host) "cd $(basedir) && hg clone
$(repo_path)"')


It doesn't ask for a password as long as I have ForwardAgent setup in
~/.ssh/config or similar.

Best,
Jordan

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