SSH onto Vagrant Box With Different Username

sshvagrant

Rather than ssh-ing onto my Vagrant virtual machine with a "vagrant" user-name and password, I'd like to use kevin/kevin.

I modified my Vagrantfile to include:

config.ssh.username = "kevin"

Then, I ran vagrant reload.

The following output showed up:

[default] Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...
Timed out while waiting for the machine to boot. This means that
Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine within
the configured ("config.vm.boot_timeout" value) time period. This can
mean a number of things.

However, I could still ssh onto my vagrant box using vagrant/vagrant, yet I I couldn't ssh onto the box with a user-name and password of kevin/kevin or kevin/vagrant.

Note that I also tried this answer (https://stackoverflow.com/a/9924122/409976), but I could only ssh onto the box with user-name vagrant, not kevin (even though it's specified in the Vagrantfile).

How can I configure my Vagrantfile so that I can ssh using user-name kevin?

Best Answer

You can ssh to the box using vagrant but NOT kevin, that's expected.

Most Vagrant base boxes have only 2 users with SSH access, root and vagrant. They both use vagrant as password, in addition, vagrant is configured for public key authentication using the insecure (why? see Vagrant insecure by default?) key pair provided in the Vagrant project on GitHub.

To be able to login as kevin, you'll have to ssh into the box and create the user (useradd -m -s /bin/bash -U kevin) first, configure public key authentication (many ways e.g ssh-copy-id, I'll leave it to you.)

You should be able to ssh into the box after creating the user using vagrant ssh if you properly set config.ssh.username in Vagrantfile.

Of course you can manually ssh into the box by (assume NAT is in use)

ssh -p 2222 kevin@localhost

or (on Linux)

ssh -p 2222 -i /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/gems/vagrant-1.5.1/keys/vagrant.pub vagrant@localhost

Related Solutions

How to use ssh agent forwarding with “vagrant ssh”

I'm using vagrant 2 on OS X Mountain Lion.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.ssh.private_key_path = "~/.ssh/id_rsa"
  config.ssh.forward_agent = true
end

config.ssh.private_key_path is your local private key
Your private key must be available to the local ssh-agent. You can check with ssh-add -L, if it's not listed add it with ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Don't forget to add you public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the Vagrant VM. You can do it copy-and-pasting or using a tool like ssh-copy-id

Using vagrant to run virtual machines with desktop environment

I just got this working with basically three steps. The advice from askubuntu.com didn't quite work for me, so try this simplified version:

Get a basic Ubuntu image working. You should be able to boot it and vagrant ssh.
Next, enable the VirtualBox display, which is off by default. Halt the VM and uncomment these lines in Vagrantfile:
```
config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
  vb.gui = true
end
```
Boot the VM and observe the new display window. Now you just need to install and start xfce4. Use vagrant ssh and:
```
sudo apt-get install xfce4
sudo startxfce4&
```

If this is the first time you're running this Ubuntu environment, you'll need to run the following command before installing xfce4:

sudo apt-get update

That's it, you should be landed in a xfce4 session.

Update: For a better experience, I recommend these improvements:

Don't start the GUI as root. You really want to stay the vagrant user. To do this you need to permit anyone to start the GUI: sudo vim /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config and edit it to allowed_users=anybody.
Next, install the VirtualBox guest tools before starting the GUI. This will give you a healthy screen resolution, integrated mouse, etc.
```
$ sudo apt-get install -y xfce4 virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11
$ sudo VBoxClient-all
```
Only now should you start the GUI as the vagrant user, with $ startxfce4&.

Update 2: Tried this today and the VBoxClient-all script isn't always installed. If it's missing, you can replace with the equivalent:

sudo VBoxClient --clipboard
sudo VBoxClient --draganddrop
sudo VBoxClient --display
sudo VBoxClient --checkhostversion
sudo VBoxClient --seamless

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to use ssh agent forwarding with “vagrant ssh”

Using vagrant to run virtual machines with desktop environment

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