root-ssh-agent

Description

A chef recipe that will allow "sudo su root" to maintain the ssh agent. This is necessary for vagrant & chef-solo to work with ssh-agent forwarding.

Installation

Clone this repository into your CHEF-REPO/cookbooks/root_ssh_agent:

# Be sure to name the cookbook "root_ssh_agent", not "chef_root_ssh_agent"
git clone git@github.com:dergachev/chef_root_ssh_agent.git root_ssh_agent

Usage

Simply include recipe[root_ssh_agent::ppid] in your run_list, and subsequently chef-solo running as root (the behavior under vagrant) will have access to your SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable, and consequently will have access your running ssh-agent instance.

Recipes

env-keep

Adds the following to /etc/sudoers.d/root_ssh_agent:

Defaults env_keep += "SSH_AUTH_SOCK"

Because it works by changing /etc/sudoers.d, this recipe will not affect the current shell session within which chef-client/chef-solo are running. Use recipe[root_ssh_agent::ppid] if you need to allow agent forwarding during a chef run.

ppid

Uses the ppid (parent process id) to find the $SSH_AUTH_SOCK path associated with the parent process (which presumably has the forwarded keys), and sets that as $SSH_AUTH_SOCK.

Because it works by setting an environment variable, this recipe only affects the current chef-client/chef-solo shell session. Use recipe[root_ssh_agent::env_keep] for a permanent fix.

Caveats

Please note if a cookbook executes commands as a non-root user (eg chef-homesick), they will not have permission to access file referenced in $SSH_AUTH_SOCK, and forwarding will fail even with recipe[root-ssh-agent::ppid].

One work-around might be to modify your recipe to use ssh user@localhost instead of su otheruser. For an example of this, see https://github.com/dergachev/chef_homesick_agent

Of course, this only works if your private key allows you to log-in as that user.

Misc notes

See the following resources:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7211287/use-ssh-keys-with-passphrase-on-a-vagrantchef-setup
• http://serverfault.com/questions/107187/sudo-su-username-while-keeping-ssh-key-forwarding#answer-118932

Vagrant boxes are supposed to include the following in sudoers, in practice they don't. See hashicorp/vagrant#1151 This can be fixed by including recipe[root_ssh_agent::env_keep] when building a base vagrant box.

Debugging tips:

• sudo su - resets all env variables, no matter what /etc/sudoers env_keep specifies. "sudo su" or "sudo su root" doesn't.
• fail @variable.to_yaml is a good way to debug a recipe from ruby
• ssh-add -l && false is a good way to debug a recipe's command resource
• `sudo VISUAL=vim visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/env_keep_sshauth