SSH and sudo over a pseudo-tty terminal

Question

I am trying to overcome some limitations in our environment to write up an authorized SSH file for passwordless ssh keys.

I am requiring to perform an ssh as a to a target system, and then run a "sudo su - , and then update the service account authorized_keys with a key"

This eventually has to go onto my ansible scripts.

I am using "ssh -t user@target "sudo su - service-user" - which actually successfully gets me into a shell for service-user. But I am not able to figure out a way to pass along the file modify commands with the above.

Any tips or alternative options?

Note: I need to use "ssh -t" option as the requiretty is not set on target systems.

Cheers!

Answer 1

Assuming you want to overwrite service-user's authorized_keys file with a completely new version, you could do something like this:

cat master_authorized_keys |
    ssh -t user@target \
        "sudo -u service-user tee ~/.ssh/authorized_keys >/dev/null"

I don't know if the -t there is really necessary, but maybe it is in your environment.