Ansible: Permission denied

Question

I'm unable to run a playbook with public key authentication. I get this error:

Trying private key: /root/.ssh/id_dsa\r\ndebug3: no such identity: /root/.ssh/id_dsa: No such file or directory\r\ndebug1: Trying private key: /root/.ssh/id_ecdsa\r\ndebug3: no such identity: /root/.ssh/id_ecdsa: No such file or directory\r\ndebug1: Trying private key: /root/.ssh/id_ed25519\r\ndebug3: no such identity: /root/.ssh/id_ed25519: No such file or directory\r\ndebug2: we did not send a packet, disable method\r\ndebug1: No more authentication methods to try.\r\nPermission denied (publickey,password)

Till now, I have been using --ask-pass authentication, but now I need to automate it so I need to do it by public key. How have I to configure it?

I have found this playbook to do it:

---
- hosts: all
  remote_user: root
  vars:
    authorized_key_list:
      - name: root
        authorized_keys:
         - key: "{{ lookup('file', '~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub') }}"
           state: present

I execute this playbook with --ask-pass and next playbook execution doesn't require password and work fine. But after some minutes it doesn't! Why? What is playbook above actually doing?

Thanks in advance.

that's not what's it will supposed to do, this will only go inside the machine B and check if the public key of machine A is present in authorized key or not — Nishant Singh

Nishant Singh Nishant Singh · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-09T12:47:40

Lets say you have 2 machines. Machine A {Ansible Host} & Machine B{ target}

On the Machine A, you will have to generate a sshkey using :

~$ ssh-keygen

This will generate a Public and Private key pair in .ssh directory of your current user.

Once the keys are generated you need to copy the public key {extension .pub} from the Machine A's .ssh directory.

Now Login to Machine B , and go inside .ssh folder of it. Now you need to create a file called "authorized_keys" (if not present, make sure the permission is readonly) and paste the copied public key from Machine A to machine B.

This is done .

Now in your host{inventory} file on machine A use the following format :

 [hosts]
Machine_B_ip ansible_ssh_user=username_here ansible_ssh_private_key_file=/path_of_private_key

ex:

    [log_export]
12.6.1.23  ansible_ssh_user=ubuntu ansible_ssh_private_key_file=/home/nsingh/dev.pem

You can do a ansible ping also to check if Ansible is able to communicate via ssh as ansible all -m ping -vi inventory_file

Ansible: Permission denied

1 Answers