Using onnode as non-root ssh user

[Martin Schwenke]

Hi Steve,

On Wed, 19 Oct 2016 14:35:45 -0500, Steve French <smfrench at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I noticed that onnode can be very useful for executing a command on
> all nodes in a cluster, but relies on ssh and in particular connecting
> as root.  Unfortunately the user root may be disabled in some
> configurations.  Is there a way to get onnode to ssh as an admin user
> other than root? is there a way to pass ssh parms to onnode
> automatically (password or key file etc.)?

Right now there is no supported way of doing that.  However...

* onnode reads the CTDB configuration

* onnode currently respects an undocumented SSH variable

  With the current onnode code, I think you could set:

    SSH="ssh -n -l adminuser"

  You would want to test to see if this works reliably for both
  normal and parallel (i.e. with "onnode -p").

  Perhaps we should change this variable to something like
  CTDB_ONNODE_SSH and document it.  However, we should work out the
  case below first.

* "onnode -P" (push files) doesn't respect the SSH variable

  I think it could be made to do this by passing the value of $SSH to
  rsync's -e option.  This would require some playing.

You could hack onnode to try out the above ideas...

peace & happiness,
martin