Remote Access through SSH

software

Author

Hongyang Zhou

Published

February 19, 2021

Proxy Jump

CI Workflow

It is very tricky to make SSH connections in CI workflows like GitHub Actions and Gitlab CI. I have suffered from both during the past few month: each spent me about a day to find a magic trick to make it work. The difficulty comes from accessing private servers from a docker machine. You need to setup the private and public keys properly and overcome multiple issues like Host key verification failed when you tries to access to a machine for the first time, proxy jump through another server, etc.

For example, I need to turn off ssh host key checking for the first time access on the university server and use a proxy jump to acccess data from the actual machine behind:

ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no hongyang@login.physics.helsinki.fi
ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -J hongyang@login.physics.helsinki.fi hongyang@turso.cs.helsinki.fi
scp -r -o 'ProxyCommand ssh hongyang@login.physics.helsinki.fi -W %h:%p' \
hongyang@turso.cs.helsinki.fi:proj/reference.tar.gz testpackage/tests/

Thanks to all the people online sharing their experience on all kinds of issues!