Single user multi server setup

Sometimes it surprises me that some of the jenkins information is either out of date or not suficient for some users. So I am creating this post to help the community.

How to setup Jenkins ssh remote plugin with a single user that connects to different server

Say you have a farm of servers to mantain.

Server name	purpose
serverA	need to run some cmds
serverB	need to run some cmds
serverJ	Jenkins

And that you want to connect to serverA and serverB and run some jobs, and you want to use a single user commonUser, and same credentials. I am not going to say this is very secure, in fact I haven’t looked into how secure this approach is, but regardless of it for now. The option is there for you to use.

Create a common user

1. Logon to each server individially: serverA and serverB
2. create a user using useradd
3. Don’t forget you need to create the account in both servers

Craete a key for the user

1. Login to serverA
2. follow your favourite instruction on using ssh-keygen

Copy the public key into serverB

1. From serverA,
2. Copy from serverA ~/.ssh/rsa_id.pub into serverB ~/.ssh/rsa_id.pub
   1. You can use: scp commonUser@serverA:/home/commonUser/.ssh/rsa_id.pub commonUser@serverB:/home/commonUser/.ssh/rsa_id.pub
3. Then in serverB used the public part of the key to add it to the authorized_keys: cat rsa_id.pub >> authorized_keys
4. Finally ensure the proper permissions are given in case the file got created chmod 644 authorized_keys

Now go into jenkins and create the one credendial

1. I don’t cover this steps but they should be easy to figure out as there is lots of info out there on this

The Short version

scp commonUser@serverA:/home/commonUser/.ssh/given_a_public_key.pub commonUser@serverB:/home/commonUser/.ssh/given_a_public_key.pub
cat given_a_public_key.pub > authorized_keys
chmod 644 authorized_keys