SSH help, anyone?

[chicken]

Does any geek among you know how to get rid of that annoying "Keyboard-interactive:" prompt when trying to SCP files from some *nix boxes (via a command-line interface)? What is it, and why is it there? It's not plain-texting my password, is it? To be safe, I usually just type nothing, then hit return and type my password at the next (regular) "Password:" prompt.

Comments

[paulv.livejournal.com]

You can either use ssh keys, or say something like

ssh -oPreferredAuthentications=hostbased,publickey,password

on the command line

The default for PreferredAuthentications is hostbased,publickey,keyboard-interactive,password, FWIW.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=hostbased,publickey,password

Just like that? With a space between the -o and the PreferredAuthentications? Because I get ssh2: FATAL: Illegal -o parameter "preferredauthentications=hostbased,publickey,password" on execution.

FYI one of the machines involved (the one on which I am executing the command) is a nasty Solaris machine using COMMERCIAL ssh (ick).

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

SSH Secure Shell 3.2.3 on the Solaris machine.

OpenSSH_3.8.1p1 on the OS X machine.

Trying to execute on the Solaris machine:

% scp -o PreferredAuthentications=hostbased,publickey,password myaccount@mymac.foo.edu:Desktop/foo.blort /www/htdocs/foo.blort

(And I cannot go in the other direction (Mac to Solaris) because in that direction I always get this error:


scp: warning: Executing scp1.
scp: FATAL: Executing ssh1 in compatibility mode failed (Check that scp1 is in your PATH).
lost connection


I can verify that if I take the Solaris machine out of the equation and insert a second OS X machine instead, everything works fine.


So SSH Secure Shell must not accept -o or something (and my SysAdmin failed to install a man page).

[paulv.livejournal.com]

It looks like the second error is because Solaris is using SSHv1 instead of SSHv2. SSHv1 is easier to attack (man in the middle), so most people are using SSHv2 now. Anyway.

The -o PreferredAuthentications stuff isn't working because that must be openssh specific. I don't remember anything about the non-openssh version of ssh. You may look at the ssh.com documentation?

Hmm, you may be able to go Mac->Solaris by using the -i option to scp to specify protocol version 1, but I don't know for sure.

Sorry. :(

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

I really wish we could switch to Linux and openSSH. *sigh* Thanks anyway!

[paulv.livejournal.com]

Er, that should have been use the -1 (the number one) option. I imagine OSX uses OpenSSH, no?

I just reread the post. Are you going from Solaris to OSX? If that's the case, you should be able to configure the sshd on OSX not to ask for keyboard-interactive...

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Yes, Solaris to OS X. How can I configure sshd to do that?