SUSE Manager: Improve SSH access to clients
Status
This project is in a very-alpha state. It's just a rough idea. Don't beat me!
Motivation
Sometimes when working with SUSE Manager (SUMA), I have the need to perform some testing actions on a registered client. Although SUMA provides ways to do that (remote command, salt remote commands), these lack interactivity. Sometimes I just need to SSH into the client and do something (read logs, quickly tweak & test something repeatedly). This usually involves copying&pasting the client FQDN, opening a terminal, typing ssh root@, paste the FQDN and connecting to SSH.
The goal of this project is to ease connecting to & controlling SUMA registered clients via SSH.
Ideas
Currently, there are 2 completely different ideas to implement that functionality.
Idea 1: Open a user-installed SSH and point it to the SUMA client
Use some web browser ssh add-on (like Chrome secure shell). Create a button in the system page in the SUMA web UI that would open the client, passing the needed data (host, post, user...) to it.
Alternatively, create a link in SUMA web UI with href=ssh://user@machine:port and make the system open it (via xdg, for instance).
Idea 2: Web-based SSH clients
Instead of a native SSH client, we could use a web based ssh client. This would need some kind of proxy between the browser and target systems for websocket/socket interoperation.
Problems
Path to system: the system doesn't necessarilly need to be accessible from the user's computer. It can be in the network with SUMA server, or it can be even hidden behind a SUMA proxy. Possible solutions:
- run some "ssh proxy" on SUMA server and SUMA proxies (in a similar fashion like salt-ssh minions),
- do nothing and explicitly target this feature for "intranet setups".
Availability of the feature: not all systems have ssh installed & running. We should enable/disable the feature in the UI based on the state of the system (we can retrieve needed data via salt (grains?)).
Parameters: we should allow adjusting ssh parameters (like username) before connecting to the machine. We could also enable some kind of "raw mode" that allows adjusting the ssh command line before connecting.
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Comments
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almost 5 years ago by pagarcia | Reply
Coincidentally I was discussing something like this at FOSDEM with @PSuarezHernandez where I was explaining what a TPAM is and how we could implement it using https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne , which offers logging capabilities.
This can be used to implement a TPAM
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