TOPIC: LOGIN
Automated entry of SSH passwords
17th February 2022A useful feature for shell scripting is automatic password entry when logging into other servers. This often involves plain text files, which are not secure. Fortunately, I found an alternative. The first step is to use the keygen tool included with SSH. The command is shown below. The -t switch defines the key type, RSA in this example. You can add a passphrase, but I chose not to for convenience. You should evaluate your security requirements before implementing this approach.
ssh-keygen -t rsa
The next step is to use the ssh-copy-id command to generate the keys for a set of login credentials. For this, it is better to use a user account with restricted access to keep as much server security as you can. Otherwise, the process is as simple as executing a command like the following and entering the password at the prompt for doing so.
ssh-copy-id [user ID]@[server address]
Getting this set up has been useful for running a file upload script to keep a web server synchronised, and it is better to have the credentials encrypted rather than kept in a plain text file.
A feast of plugins
6th July 2007Here's a useful idea: get your blog login page to look like it's part of your blog. It does work well on my hillwalking blog, but you do have to watch how it behaves with whatever theme you are using. Strangely, I couldn't make it work on my offline blog, the development mirror of what you see online. The ability to set what page is displayed after logging in or logging out is an especially useful inclusion.
These sound like wonderful ideas: being able to control the running order of things on your blog sidebar is a good thing. What scuppered my using them is that you need widgets turned on for the effect to work, and I have seen issues with how ID's have been set when things are widgetised.