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On a daily basis, I interact with 10s of productions servers which do not, and should not have a home directory for my personal user.

Every SSH session is met with the same error message:

Could not chdir to home directory /home/Me: No such file or directory
Killed by signal 1.

Is there a way to prevent SSH from trying to cd me into /home/Me, or is there any other way to surpress this message?

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7
  • "which do not, and should not have a home directory for my personal user." that is a very strange setup indeed. How is the sshd daemon expected to know in which directory you should land upon connecting? Have a look at ChrootDirectory but it needs various setup. Or something like that to adapt : ForceCommand bash -c "cd /tmp; bash --login" (ugly, and not sure that works), otherwise you need to look at PAM and specially pam_mkhomedir that you will need to plug from sshd PAM config.
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Jun 29, 2018 at 21:59
  • @PatrickMevzek These are production virtual machines, there are thousands of them, across tens of different fleets. Even if I automated the creation of a home directory for me on each of them, it would only be temporary, because VMs are shutdown and created as necessary to fit demand.
    – Alexander
    Jun 29, 2018 at 22:36
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    @PatrickMevzek Ideally, I was hoping there might be some flag to tell SSH to spit me out at /
    – Alexander
    Jun 29, 2018 at 22:36
  • This is the purpose of pam_mkhomedir it creates the home directory automatically upon login, if missing. And you can centralize authentication through some LDAP server so no need to have you as user in /etc/passwd. Or it can be in the VM template. Otherwise you could always recompile your own ssh that does 'chdir /' but I am not sure it is a good idea, just try ForceCommand or even better proper user management with PAM, this will be simpler...
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Jun 29, 2018 at 22:48
  • @PatrickMevzek I'll talk with the devops team, see what they think. I suspect they wouldn't be too fond of the idea of every ssh'ed user opening new dirs on prod servers
    – Alexander
    Jun 29, 2018 at 22:55

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
0

Edit /etc/passwd and replace the relevant home directory with /.

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3
  • I can't do this on the production servers. Even if I did, it would be one off, and every one of the hundreds of other servers wouldn't have it.
    – Alexander
    Jun 29, 2018 at 20:11
  • pssh -l youruser -h listofserver.txt 'sudo usermod -d / youruser'
    – Some Linux Nerd
    Jun 29, 2018 at 20:14
  • @SomeLinuxNerd This doesn't work my application :( I can't make a predefined list of servers, because the servers I need to SSH into are rather ad-hoc, and most of them are VMs with limited lifespan (e.g. peak scaling for a certain time of year). And when I said I was dealing with hundreds of servers, I really did mean hundreds.
    – Alexander
    May 13, 2019 at 18:10
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You can provide an aaa value for the homedir and point it to /tmp or something from your radius or ldap account.

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7
  • Could you elaborate on this? What's an "aaa value"?
    – Alexander
    Jun 29, 2018 at 20:10
  • well you lack homedir on multiple server so i assume that you authenticate using an aaa (authentication, authorization, accounting) server like radius, tacacs+ or ldap/ad? you can most likely use the same mechanism for the attribute 'homedir'
    – Jonas Bjork
    Jun 29, 2018 at 20:18
  • I don't actually now what authentication mechanism is being used. Is there a simple way to check?
    – Alexander
    Jun 29, 2018 at 20:23
  • well if you have access you could browse through /etc/pam.d config files or perhaps ask your server env design guys
    – Jonas Bjork
    Jun 29, 2018 at 20:32
  • and /etc/ssh/sshd_config should give you a clue as well
    – Jonas Bjork
    Jun 29, 2018 at 20:33

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