photon vm ssh <VM_IP or vm_name or vm_uuid>without password

[crook]

Shall we have support for this command: photon vm ssh <vm_ip or vm name or vm uuid>?

[AlainRoy]

Hi,

It's an interesting idea, but it's not clear how it would work. People can create any VM they want, with any configuration they want. There's no guarantee that we can inject anything into the VM, so it's not clear we could do this.

There may be some limited cases in which we could do this, but I'd be worried that it would be a security hole. How would we control who gets access to the VM?

My gut says this is both very risky and very challenging. That said, if you'd like to propose how it would work and how it would be secure, I'd be happy to hear your suggestion.

[crook]

@AlainRoy, this enhancement can be devided into 2 pharse:

• 1. Just support photon vm ssh , then use stil need to input password.
     So far, user firstyl need to run 'vm show UUID' to get the VM IP, then type 'ssh . This enhancment can merge 2 steps into one step. It should be simply implement.
• 1. Let user can login the Vm console without password.
     Take AWS for example, user can get the ssh_key file, can use the key to sshed into VM console. Just llike AWS EC2 key pairs. The cloud-init can insert the user publib ssh key during VM is booting up

[AlainRoy]

I agree that #1 is simple and we can do that.

For #2, it's not so obvious to me. When you say "the cloud-init", you're referring to something that may or may not exist. We're talking about arbitrary VMs. The user could have made a Windows 95 VM if they really wanted to. We're not limiting what kinds of VMs they make or how they are configured.

We have discussed direct access to the console via the UI, similar to what the ESXi Host Client does. I think that's a really cool idea, but it would be via the UI, not the command-line.