Running a Program on a Remote Server Using SSH

How do you run a program on a remote server using ssh?

For this example we'll have two servers, one named Johnny and another named Cash. Both are running openssh. Our goal is to have a program on Johnny login to Cash and run a program on Cash. To make the task a little more complex we'll be using different users on each machine.

The first thing we'll need to do is generate public and private keys on Johnny. So, logged into Johnny as user 'boy' we create public and private keys by creating them in the .ssh directory as follows:

In the example above we picked an arbitrary name, sue, to identify the files that hold the generated keys. When prompted to enter a passphrase (twice) we simply hit enter twice.

As the output of ssh-keygen indicates, the public key has been saved in a file named sue.pub.

The output of ssh-keygen implies, but doesn't indicate directly, that the private key is in a file named sue (Yes, a user named boy created a file named sue.)

The private key file, sue, will remain on Johnny for the reaminder of this exercise, but the public key must be moved to the remote server, Cash.

Note that the .ssh directory itself, as well as the sue and sue.pub files should have permissions of 700.

Now you'll need to ftp the sue.pub file from Johnny to Cash. The user on Cash that we'll login as is user 'named'.

Now we'll telnet into Cash and concatenate the sue.pub file into /home/named/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

Let's recap what we've done so far.

1) We've created public and private keys on Johnny.

2) We've ftp'd the public key file, sue.pub, from Johnny to Cash.

3) We've telnetted to Cash, and concatenated the contents of sue.pub into authorized_keys

We're now ready to manually login from Johnny to Cash using ssh.

Now on Johnny, create a shell script called 'boynamedsue.sh' with the following one line of contents and chmod the script to 777.

Next, execute the script on Johnny.

You just executed a program on Johnny, that logged into Cash and ran a program (unix 'ls -l').

The next step you'll want to take is to replace the '/usr/bin/ls -l' command in the boynamedsue.sh program with the path and name of the program that you want to run.