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Setting up new users with a sandbox account / Dealing with SSH keys

Last updated November 9, 2012.

After a user has requested a drupal.org sandbox, here's how to set them up with an account:

  1. If they're asking for a new sandbox, make sure there's sufficient space first.
  2. First, connect to Jenkins.
  3. Run the create_user_devwww job. Enter:

    username: their drupal.org username
    sshkey: Their full SSH key, available by clicking edit, then copy/pasting the entry at http://drupal.org/user/X/ssh-keys

    Jenkins interface for adding users

Note: This works in the 90% case. It will fail if a user has OSL LDAP access (e.g. for production server access) which only a handful of people have, but they're all trusted and most of them do stuff on Drupal.org so this does come up sometimes.

If that's the case, contact Narayan, Gerhard, or Neil.

Resolving a lockout

If a user has locked themselves out via DenyHosts (gets error "ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host"), admins with sudo access on devwww can purge the denyhosts list by running the following:

devwww.drupal ~ # /etc/init.d/denyhosts stop
* Stopping DenyHosts daemon ...                                                      [ ok ]
devwww.drupal ~ # vim /etc/hosts.deny

edit the entry with an old date, ex:
# DenyHosts: Fri Mar 9 19:30:39 2010 | sshd: 137.149.66.189
devwww.drupal ~ # denyhosts.py -c /etc/denyhosts.conf --purge
devwww.drupal ~ # /etc/init.d/denyhosts start
* Starting DenyHosts daemon ...                                                      [ ok ]

Changing an SSH key

If a user reports the problem "ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host" when logging into devwww, either their SSH key changed, or there is some other problem with it.

To fix, issue the following command on devwww:

sudo vim ~[username]/.ssh/authorized_keys

(Enter your LDAP/Jenkins password when prompted)

Then, add/replace the key accordingly.

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