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KeyBox: A better way to SSH

sshkeybox.com

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: KeyBox: A better way to SSH

#11
post #7

This is the kind of thing I currently use Ansible for. Is there a big advantage to using KeyBox for this instead?

Ansible is a good idea for something like that. The groups is a handy feature.

Also the multiple terminal session stuff is rather useful in an emergency patch across a ton of servers. (Drupal patch last month it was very handy)

Re: KeyBox: A better way to SSH

#12
It's a neat system, but I also like that it's written in Java. Given all the new things coming out with Go, Scala, clojure node.js and what not it's inspiring to see people still also building things on top of the Java platform with just straight up Java. I haven't used struts but it doesn't look that crazy when looking at this code. It looks pretty sane.

Re: KeyBox: A better way to SSH

#13
post #6

Single point of compromise. :( I wish people would just stop with these things. The appropriate way to be able to manage many users is called LDAP, it's been LDAP for decades and it's unlikely to change. These days it's super easy to use SSH keys with LDAP, still using the standard openssh-lpk schema but now not requiring any patches to OpenSSH itself, just need to use the AuthorizedKeysCommand and an appropriate hel…

The thing about keybox is that it's nice and fast to get better. For someone that doesn't have an ops team, or even an ops person, it is a neat solution. Yes you need to be careful with it, I ran it on an internal VM, with only 2 users who had access to the admin console. I'd love to see something as simple to use as keybox based around LDAP, I've had a google and can't see anything.

If you're a very small operation, using a configuration management tool to provision users with SSH keys is pretty simple.

Re: KeyBox: A better way to SSH

#14
Does anyone know of a web-based ssh solution that has good enough termcaps to allow me to enjoyably use vim + tmux inside of a web browser? Also, it can't use browser extensions (but can use plugins like flash/java/etc.)

Re: KeyBox: A better way to SSH

#15
post #6

Single point of compromise. :( I wish people would just stop with these things. The appropriate way to be able to manage many users is called LDAP, it's been LDAP for decades and it's unlikely to change. These days it's super easy to use SSH keys with LDAP, still using the standard openssh-lpk schema but now not requiring any patches to OpenSSH itself, just need to use the AuthorizedKeysCommand and an appropriate hel…

IIRC the ”original” SSH server (from SSH Communications Security Oyj) can handle key management. Is there anyone who has tried it and want to share their experiences?

Re: KeyBox: A better way to SSH

#16
post #9

Adding the browser to the mix won't make it much more secure, I fear.

I especially like the absurdity presented in this diagram:

http://sshkeybox.com/img/keybox_dia.jpg

Not only does it create a single point of failure in the Administration, but the third case illustrates that this is some kind of feature, advertising blocking normal SSH traffic to the server network, instead replacing it with HTTPS traffic.

Please don't do this. Just accept SSH and learn to deal with it. If you can't, maybe systems administration is not for you and you should pay someone to do it.

Re: KeyBox: A better way to SSH

#19
post #7

This is the kind of thing I currently use Ansible for. Is there a big advantage to using KeyBox for this instead?

I've used fabric for basically the same thing. Basically just runs shell commands across lots of servers. Our 5-person operation used DigitalOcean with a custom image that contained about 80% of our config, and then a fabric script that managed things like deploys and emergency patches.
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