[Bio-Linux] SSH Question

[Dr Dan Swan]

On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 15:46, Kerr Wall wrote:

Hi Kerr,

> I have a question concerning ssh.  I have received a request from the
> programmer at Cornell who is responsible for getting FGP tracefiles from our
> server in an automated fashion to switch from the openSSH server that came
> with the clone to the comercial version at ssh.com.  He has stated that the
> script he has written to automatically login to our server doesn't work with
> openSSH and that it only works with the version from ssh.com.
> 
> Would you guys recommend this (ie, would this cause any dependency problems
> or are there any security concerns that I don't know about)?  If so, what is
> the best way to uninstall openSSH and then install SSH (I'm guessing that
> using the rpm command will accomplish this)?  If not, do you have any
> suggestions for him to get a working perl script to automatically login with
> openSSH?

So he wants you to change the OpenSSH daemon on your clone because he's
using a commercial version of the ssh client?  That's a bit unfair ;)

Its perfectly possible to install the commercial version of the ssh
daemon on the clone, although you will not be able to do it using an rpm
as it supplied as a source tarball.  There's no licencing issue as its
free for academics.  I would suggest however that your colleague
downloads the client/base rpms from www.openssh.org and installs those
on his machine.  I am suprised though, I have not had any
interoperability issues with open/commercial ssh : 

[dswan at bioinf4 downloads]$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_3.4p1, SSH protocols 1.5/2.0, OpenSSL 0x0090602f
[dswan at bioinf4 downloads]$ ssh XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
dswan at 138.37.232.110's password: 

Last login: Wed Feb 19 2003 14:17:54 from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

Welcome to toybox, take a vigil in the wilderness of mirrors.
--
28/5/2002 - outages due to Lonon Electricity power failure
No mail.

[dswan at toybox dswan]$ /usr/local/sbin/sshd2 -V
sshd2: SSH Secure Shell 3.2.0 (non-commercial version) on
i686-pc-linux-gnu

Are you sure you're both using ssh protocol version 2?  They should play
fair together unless there's a protocol mismatch.

If he really isn't prepared to do make the switch then I can send you a
blow by blow account on installing the ssh.com version of sshd and
replacing OpenSSH.  But I'm not going to recommend it as the best
solution!

If he has written the script to log into your clone.. how edoes he know
it works with the commercial ssh daemon anyway?  Just curious!  Any
chance we can get a peek at the script (with usernames and passwords
removed of course!).

regards,

Dan

-- 
Dr Dan Swan - Bio-Linux Developer
EGTDC, CEH, Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3SR
Tel: 01865 281 630 Fax: 01865 281 696
http://envgen.nox.ac.uk/ | dswan at ceh.ac.uk