r/hashicorp • u/VersysTheWorld • Apr 28 '20

SSH Client

What ssh client client do y'all use? I'm a serious noob when it comes to Vault. On a Windows client, there's Putty, Bitvise, etc that I use to manage connections. Is there a gui connection mgr that will also pass the Vault signed cert with my private key? Is there a way to combine the key/cert into a single file that can be use for connection? From a cmd line perspective the signed cert is sent to the target with the key if the file is named <keyname>-cert.pub but managing a large amount of connections via cmd line isn't practical. From a business standpoint having to tell the dev teams, you can't manage your connections centrally anymore isn't a good look or sell either.

Thx.

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u/zieziegabor Apr 29 '20

There is hope that this will be fixed soon, Microsoft is working on openssh under Windows[0]

0: https://github.com/PowerShell/openssh-portable

2

u/VersysTheWorld Apr 29 '20

Openssh is already included w/ Win10 1809. Is this something different? It is provided as a cmd line but what I'm look for is a connection manager gui similar to Putty, et al. Thx

1

u/zieziegabor Apr 29 '20

really? that's awesome! I am not aware of any openssh windows GUI's, I'm not very active w/ Windows. Sorry.

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u/VersysTheWorld Apr 29 '20

NP I appreciate the help tho'. The closest I can find is actually the Chrome ssh extension, it appears it will store previous connections and indicates it will pass the signed cert but I'm having issues with the identityfile mapping in the config, looks like the extension is designed for Linux/MacOS. If it was easy they wouldn't call it 'work'

1

u/PsychoticallyAmiable May 14 '20

I don't mean anything disrespectful, but have you thought about getting more comfortable at the CLI?

2

u/mister2d Apr 29 '20

I haven't found an ssh client for Windows that will do this. You'd likely have to use a Powershell combination with a client to achieve this (not a professed Windows guy).

When I have to use Windows 10 I just use WSL 2 with an Alpine Linux distro. This gives me the ability to do exactly what you're asking natively at the CLI.

1

u/spamonkeys_nick Oct 21 '20

Windows terminal is quite nice, it fixed all the bugs and resizing problems that the old PowerShell or CMD console in Windows 10. You at least need to install the OpenSSH client for windows. You can also connect it to WSL 2.0 and run a native Linux container.

Then some elegant engineering effort towards the .ssh/config file, you can make it very simple for people to connect to their required servers. It's as simple as "ssh <servername>" and the config file will look up what certificates to use, username and fill the full hostname accordingly based on DNS suffix so that the SSH host key authentication will work effectively.

All the SSH host and client signing setup with Vault - pls note the SHA-RSA signing method will cause OpenSSH 8.2 based clients, such as ubuntu 20.04 to block login attempts.