Enabling password-less SSH for Ansible

Generate an SSH key pair on the Ansible administration node and distribute the public key to each node in the storage cluster so that Ansible can access the nodes without being prompted for a password.

Before you begin

Before you begin, make sure that you have the following prerequisites in place:

Access to the Ansible administration node.
Ansible user with sudo access to all nodes in the storage cluster.
For Red Hat Enterprise 9, to log in as a root user, see Enabling SSH login as root user on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and 10.

About this task

Important: If you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 only use these steps if you are a non-root user. If you are a root user, go to Bootstrapping a new storage cluster.

Procedure

Generate the SSH key pair, accept the default file name and leave the passphrase empty.
```
ssh-keygen
```
For example,
```
[ansible@admin ~]$ ssh-keygen
```
Copy the public key to all nodes in the storage cluster.
```
ssh-copy-id USER_NAME@HOST_NAME
```
Replace USER_NAME with the new user name for the Ansible user. Replace HOST_NAME with the host name of the Ceph node.
For example,
```
[ansible@admin ~]$ ssh-copy-id ceph-admin@host01
```

Create the user’s SSH config file.

touch ~/.ssh/config

For example,

[ansible@admin ~]$ touch ~/.ssh/config

Open the config file for editing.
Set values for the Hostname and User options for each node in the storage cluster.
Important: By configuring the ~/.ssh/config file you do not have to specify the -u USER_NAME option each time you execute the ansible-playbook command.
```
Host host01
   Hostname HOST_NAME
   User USER_NAME
Host host02
   Hostname HOST_NAME
   User USER_NAME
...
```
Replace HOST_NAME with the host name of the Ceph node. Replace USER_NAME with the new user name for the Ansible user.
For example,
```
Host host01
   Hostname host01
   User ceph-admin
Host host02
   Hostname host02
   User ceph-admin
Host host03
   Hostname host03
   User ceph-admin
```
Set the correct file permissions for the ~/.ssh/config file.
```
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config
```