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Posts: 62 | Thanked: 18 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Missouri, USA
#266
Originally Posted by fnordianslip View Post
Actually, a potentially good idea might be to set up an 'smscon' user on the server machine, with no privileges and no login shell.

Then, in the N900's /home/user/.ssh/config, specify for the server host the specific private key (with IdentityFile) to be used to connect to the server, and specify the User as smscon. You would then need to generate a special key pair for the smscon user, with no passphrase.

That way, your normal private keys can have passphrase protection, but the one used by SMScon to make the ssh connection to the server can't compromise accounts on other machines, but should be able to set up the tunnels.

I've not actually tried this, but I think it could work in practice.
This would work great, I think. Do you know how to create an ssh user with no privileges and, especially, no login shell?
I tried reading about chroot jail and rssh, but these options still give the user some type of limited shell, don't they? I googled but did not find how to allow only tunnelling with no shell access. Any pointers?

Thanks,