Re: [Fab-user] Initiating a 3rd party SSH connection using run()

[Jeff Forcier]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Jordan Levy <address@hidden> wrote:

> I have ForwardAgent setup on my local machine so that initiating an SSH
> session to host1, then to host2 from host1, works just fine without
> providing a password. I'm assuming that Fabric does not use
> ForwardAgent? This would be fine if I were at least prompted for a
> password during the operation.

Hi Jordan,

I can't answer 100% conclusively, but I don't *think* Fabric currently
honors ForwardAgent (or, for that matter, anything else in
.ssh/config*). I've just trawled all over the place looking to see if
anyone's gotten Paramiko (our SSH substrate) doing this and didn't
find anything. Ditto for Twisted Conch (a potential replacement).

It does look like Ruby's Net-SSH library supports agent forwarding,
but that doesn't exactly help us any over here :( I'm guessing that,
assuming I'm not missing something, the dev(s) on that lib had more
need for the feature (or time to implement it) than the
Paramiko/Twisted devs.

If anyone can chime in on this with more info or a "you're wrong,
Jeff, and here's why", that'd be great, otherwise you're probably out
of luck until someone patches one of those libs. (If you have the time
and want to specifically ping e.g. the Paramiko list about this, feel
free.)

Best,
Jeff

* Parsing .ssh/config, in general, is possible with both libs, so I
would like to eventually work in HostName/User support at the very
least. But ForwardAgent is likely to be a bigger fish to fry, and
(IMHO) more of an edge case, so I'm not sure it's something I have
time to tackle myself, even if it is something we could do at our
level instead of needing to be in Paramiko itself.