ssh-rcopy-id

ssh-rcopy-id

Copy user public keys using root privileges

Warning: This code is expected to be executed by a user with root privileges. You should review the source code and test it on an isolated host before unleashing it on your valuable server estate!

Overview

In a corporate IT environment with a mixture of Linux and Unix platforms, it's frequently painful to manage SSH public keys and associated authorized_keys files on workstations and servers. This program attempts to ease the pain by allowing a bastion host with root access to other servers to deploy keys on behalf of end users.

Installation

• Clone the Git repository
• Run go build from within the repo
• Move the resulting binary to a location like /usr/local/sbin
• Test it with ssh-rcopy-id --help

Usage

The following is a basic usage summary. See the --help for details of other configuration options.

• Create a subdirectory for the utility (E.g. /root/rcopy)
• Copy (or create) the config file (/root/rcopy/ssh-rcopy-id.yml)
  • As a minimum, add the keys root will use to authenticate to the destination servers.
• Create a subdirectory for holding the user's public keys (E.g. /root/rcopy/pubkeys)
• Populate the pubkeys directory with the keys you want to deploy.
  • The file name is important! It should be <username>.auth.
  • The extension auth is used in preference to pub to avoid confusion; The file might contain multiple public keys. The content will be deployed as ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.
• Change directory to /root/rcopy and run ssh-rcopy-id --hosts=<host1>,<host2>.