Ssh – Making ssh truly quiet

bashnagiosssh

I'm half way through writing a nagios script and I've hit an annoyance with SSH.

According to the man page:

-q       Quiet mode.  Causes all warning and diagnostic messages to be
         suppressed.

Yet if I enable the quiet flag and then pass an invalid port, I still get an error:

$ ssh user@localhost -q -p test
Bad port 'test'

This is a problem, because that will make that message the first line out and that's what is grabbed by Nagios. I need to output something like "Warning|SSH error" after picking up on a != 0 exit code from ssh, but the first line I can output on is going to be line 2.

How can I make SSH TRULY quiet?

Note: I wasn't sure whether to post this question on serverfault, on superuser or on stackoverflow. I went with serverfault as the user base are probably most experienced with cli SSH and cli scripting workarounds.

Best Answer

ssh user@localhost -q -p test 2> /dev/null

will redirect stderr to /dev/null.

Related Solutions

Ssh – How to automate SSH login with password

Don't use a password. Generate a passphrase-less SSH key and push it to your VM.

If you already have an SSH key, you can skip this step… Just hit Enter for the key and both passphrases:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Copy your keys to the target server:

$ ssh-copy-id id@server
id@server's password:

Now try logging into the machine, with ssh 'id@server', and check-in:

.ssh/authorized_keys

Note: If you don't have .ssh dir and authorized_keys file, you need to create it first

to make sure we haven’t added extra keys that you weren’t expecting.

Finally, check to log in…

$ ssh id@server

id@server:~$

You may also want to look into using ssh-agent if you want to try keeping your keys protected with a passphrase.

SSH – Bad Owner or Permissions on ~/.ssh/config

I needed to have rw for user only permissions on config. This fixed it.

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config

As others have noted below, it could be the file owner. (upvote them!)

chown $USER ~/.ssh/config

If your whole folder has invalid permissions here's a table of possible permissions:

Path	Permission
.ssh directory (code)	0700 (drwx------)
private keys (ex: `id_rsa`) (code)	0600 (-rw-------)
`config`	0600 (-rw-------)
public keys (*.pub ex: `id_rsa.pub`)	0644 (-rw-r--r--)
`authorized_keys` (code)	0644 (-rw-r--r--)
`known_hosts`	0644 (-rw-r--r--)

Sources:

openssh check-perm.c
openssh readconf.c
openssh ssh_user_config fix_authorized_keys_perms

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ssh – How to automate SSH login with password

SSH – Bad Owner or Permissions on ~/.ssh/config

Related Topic