Brock, Installing ssh keys on 400 hosts might be a good amount of work, but it doesn't really involve "installing" anything but a directory and a file under your home directory on those boxes. The upside is that no password information goes onto the wire when you use keys (unless they are served via NFS or some other network file system), and you can use ssh-agent to store your credentials instead of rolling your own solution. Just my 2 cents, Troy >>> brockn at gmail.com 05/24/05 9:18 AM >>> I work for a large corporation and there is about 2200 boxes in my environment alone. Since I don't work for the UNIX team I cannot install things on the boxes, because I am just a user. This includes keys for authentication. The password will NOT be stored in the script. I am writing some scripts for my own personal use that I want to be able to go out to say 400 boxes and then run some command. Since I have the same username and password, I plan on writing a script which asks for them once and then stores them, in a variable - only temporarily, for all of the boxes. Expect will work GREAT! Thanks for the help! On 5/24/05, Jima <jima at beer.tclug.org> wrote: > On Tue, 24 May 2005, Munir Nassar wrote: > > not quite exactly what you want, but if you use passphraseless keys it > > should do what you want. that is, ssh without asking for a password. > > Did you read the first paragraph of his email? > > > I am writing a script which will take a password as an arg and need to > > use that password when for sshing around. For various reasons I cannot > > use key based authentication. > > Not that I disagree with you; the "password-in-a-script" concept makes me > uneasy (not that I know of a way to implement it). I'd sooner put my > efforts into remedying whatever prevents key-based auth from being an > option. > > Jima > > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list