Inventory Can't SSH in to Debian Laptop

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-18T13:20:31.000Z

Hey all,

We have a Debian laptop running Lenny that we are trying to add to our inventory. The scan picks up the device perfectly fine, its just trying to SSH in to it that is the issue. The laptop uses password authentication and when I run putty to SSH in to the device, I can get in perfectly fine.

I have been trying to find if there is a log file that tells me what the issue is rather than simply outputting “Nope. Didn’t work.”, but I cannot seem to find one. We are using port 22, which is open and listening on the laptop.

Any suggestions? Thanks

maxsec · 2013-09-18T13:49:42.000Z

who are you sshing in as, needs to be a root or similar.

also might need to increase you ssh timeout in advanced settings if your DNS and reverse DNS aren’t correct and the ssh takes while to actually login

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-18T13:52:30.000Z

I’m SSHing in as myself. SSH is disabled for root, but my user has sudo privileges.

I’ll try increasing the SSH timeout, but I’m certain our DNS and reverse DNS are correct. Thanks for the help

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-18T14:13:31.000Z

running “sudo tail -f /var/log/auth.log” on the linux host shows no attempt to authenticate at all… when I use putty, it shows up right away. It seems like spiceworks isn’t even trying to SSH in when I try to authenticate my credentials.

maxsec · 2013-09-18T16:25:12.000Z

and you’re using putty from the SPW machine (just in case there’s a firewall blocking this somewhere)

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-19T06:02:27.000Z

Yeah, using putty from the machine I am running spiceworks on and nothing

maxsec · 2013-09-19T12:50:40.000Z

ah there you go then, you need to get this going of course

check you can ping first of all so you know routing etc is good.

then check the Windows firewall on the SPW server is allowing port 22 out and check ip-tables on the Debian box will allow port 22 in from the SPW server.

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-19T13:05:10.000Z

Got it working on putty, seems that I was using a high port (22222). Still nothing on the Spiceworks side even after changing it to port 22. I used wire shark to sniff traffic on port 22 and there is certainly communication between Spiceworks and the debian laptop, just not enough to authenticate. Stumped.

maxsec · 2013-09-19T13:10:46.000Z

ah well then you’ll need to tell SPW to use port 22222 instead of port 22 then of course…

http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/1761-scaning-on-non-standard-ports

If you changed the debian system to use 22 don’t forget to restart the sshd (service sshd restart) if you’re sshd and not xinetd to handle the ssh traffic.

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-19T13:13:02.000Z

Thanks, restarted it and it works fine on port 22 with putty. same credentials on Spiceworks using port 22 and there is definite communication, just no authentication.

maxsec · 2013-09-19T13:18:30.000Z

OK good progress (I’d check why this was on port 22222 - could be a valid reason!

, so SPW will need to have the root username/passwd and have bash as the root shell also.

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-19T13:22:03.000Z

Sorry, I forgot to mention, we use port 22222 at our company, I forgot to change it when I was testing it out

I’ll check out your other suggestion now, thank you for your help!

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-19T13:36:21.000Z

I’m pretty certain that the issue is due to new host key verification that occurs when I try to connect for the first time . I noticed this when I SSH’ed in to the laptop through putty. I’m hoping there’s a way to verify it through Spiceworks.

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-19T14:09:55.000Z

Although I now know that the issue is due to the key authentication, I have no idea how to fix it to allow it to authenticate.

maxsec · 2013-09-19T14:17:51.000Z

ah spw doesnt support key auth, needs to be passwd auth

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-19T14:24:49.000Z

The thing is, the laptops we have use password authentication. Here’s an example of what happens when I try to connect the first time through putty: http://i.imgur.com/olT4cOH.jpg

That is what I think is blocking it.

maxsec · 2013-09-19T15:07:49.000Z

Thats just the standard putty cache check

shouldnt affect spw at all

so root can ssh in fine via putty abd a password?

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-20T06:02:14.000Z

I believe we disable root SSH for security reasons. I’ll see if I can temporarily allow it and I’ll give it a shot.

liamprice4189 · 2013-09-20T09:45:54.000Z

Tried it out with root, connects fine via putty, but still no luck with Spiceworks.

maxsec · 2013-09-20T11:22:57.000Z

Anything in the finder*.logs on the SPW logs dir?

Might be useful to email support@spiceworks.com referencing this thread and they’ll walk you though increasing the logging level and tell you how to get the logs to them to analysis