Anyone who has to administer a lot of *NIX servers has been in the position of needing to execute remote commands on those servers as root. Usually it is done to change a file or run a command. The easy way to do this is to run your command with ssh as the root user but, we all know how bad it is to leave "PermitRootLogin yes" in our sshd_config files. On many systems this is the default setting. But allowing root a remote login through SSH is a security issue so we turn it off. This begs the question what are you to do when you need to execute commands remotely on systems as root but root logins are disabled? It's easier than you think.
Usually when you need to execute these commands it is for a group of servers. To start put your SSH key on all the machines you need to execute your commands on and don't put a password on your key when setting it up. If want to know how to do this look here. After setting those up on your machines you should be able to login to each one without needing a password.
Next, setup sudo so your user can execute commands with root privileges. If you need to know how to do this look here. Here's the short version. As root type "visudo" and put in "yourusername ALL=(ALL) ALL". If your using Ubuntu then this is likely already done for you.
Now with your SSH keys setup and your sudo privs set we are ready. Before you type this command there is a WARNING. This command makes you type your password in cleartext for anyone to see. DON'T type this command in your terminal program because it will stay in your history. DON'T type it on screen because it will stay in your terminals scroll back buffer. The safest way to use this is to make a script, chmod 700 the file, and execute that file. Better yet only type the password in the file right before you need to execute it. Then remove the password from the file when your done. This is still not a super secure way to do this but if remote root is turned off you might not have a choice.
From the machine your going to use to login to your other machines execute the command below. Where it says "hostname" put in the hostname of the machine your trying to get into. Where it says "password" put your password. Where it says "command" put the command your trying to execute like "df -h". As with any command on the command line if there are any special characters you will need to escape them with \ in the bash shell at least. I'll put in an examples with comments below the first line.
# original command ssh hostname "echo password | sudo -S command" # execute command "df -h" with escaped password character ! ssh host.pantz.org "echo PaSSworD\! | sudo -S df -h"
Using SSH and sudo this way works best when the above line is part of a script. This gives you the ability to automate executing the same command across many machines at one time.
Here is a little shell script you might use with the above command. The /home/user/hosts file the script refers to is just a text file with a single host name on each line. It will execute whatever command you give it from the command line for each host in the hosts file. So if you called your script go.sh then you could execute the command "df -h" by typing "./go.sh df -h".
#!/bin/bash
for HOST in $(< /home/user/hosts); do
echo ""
echo "###############"
echo "# HOSTNAME: $HOST"
echo "###############"
# This line is for back grounding each command to execute them on all systems at once
# ssh -q -o ConnectTimeout=3 $HOST "echo password | sudo -S $* >/dev/null 2>&1 &"
ssh -q -o ConnectTimeout=3 $HOST "echo password | sudo -S $*"
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "---- COULD NOT CONNECT TO $HOST ----"
fi
done
Good luck and be careful with this command. Please don't use it from the command line. On some distributions your sudo commands are logged to /var/log/secure but the echo statement with the password does not show up so no worries about that.
