3

How can I use rsync with passphrases? All googled "solutions" i found use passphrase-less keys which seems no real option.

i am runnning 2 ubuntu servers 12.04.2 LTS.

dessert
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Pascal
  • 127

4 Answers4

5

If you're using rsync with a regular user, ssh-agent may be what you are looking for.

If ran into this problem while using rsync in a cron job. Cron jobs are run by the user cron in a restricted environement (some env var like SSH_AUTH_SOCK are missing, so ssh-agent does not work).

A walkthrough is to use keychain. Keychain keeps ssh-agent environement variables in a file.
So, first you install keychain.
Then, you add these lines in your .bashrc, .zshrc or .profile file (tweak it to match your ssh keys):

/usr/bin/keychain $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa
source $HOME/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh

Additionnaly, to make cron jobs work, you can add this line at the beggining of your cron scripts:

source $HOME/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh


More infos in this article : http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/10/08/some-notes-on-logging-and-ssh-access-from-cron-jobs/

Abd
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3
rsync -Pavp --rsh="ssh -i YOUR_KEY" DEST USER@REMOTE:SOURCE
muru
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Vinz
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0

I found the perfect answer to this on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3299951/how-to-pass-password-for-rsync-ssh-command

It worked perfect for me. It is a security risk as kainjow says, but it solves the problem.

Answer by kainjow:

If you can't use a public/private keys, you can use expect:

#!/usr/bin/expect
spawn rsync SRC DEST
expect "password:"
send "PASS\n"
expect eof
if [catch wait] {
    puts "rsync failed"
    exit 1
}
exit 0

You will need to replace SRC and DEST with your normal rsync source and destination parameters, and replace PASS with your password. Just make sure this file is stored securely!

Guilherme Corrêa Peralta
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-1

I guess all you want is the '-e' parameter for rsync to use a ssh connection, which automaticly asks for your passphrase...

rsync -avze ssh /home/user remoteuser@example.com:/backups This would copy /home/user from your local computer to your remote computers /backups directory

FrankM
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