zool

Zool

zool (which is named after Zuul, "The Gatekeeper", from the movie Ghostbusters) is a gem to manage authorized_keys files on a set of n servers. It comes with a command-line client named zool which gives you access to the common tasks.

Installation

• install ruby
• install rubygems
• gem install zool

You also need a zool.conf file and a keys directory (where the public keys are stored) to use the command-line client.

The command-line client

the command-line client currently supports 3 commands:

• fetch
  fetches the authorized_keys files from a file (defaults to /etc/hosts) or a list of hosts (see zool -h for more info), splits them up, removes duplicates and saves them to a .pub file in the keys (will be configurable... later...) directory. It tries to generate the name of the keyfile by parsing the key for a someuser@somehost value at the end of the key. It only uses the someuser value to generate the keyfile name. That may become configurable later You can specify a user / password for the fetch and setup tasks. See zool -h for details.
• setup
  this task creates the keys directory, fetches the keys and naively creates a simple version of a zool.conf. That will experience some overhaul for sure because it is only capable to create server directives for every server and isn't smart enough to group keys. You can specify a user / password for the fetch and setup tasks. See zool -h for details.
• apply
  reads the zool.conf and distributes the keys to the servers specified in the configuration file.
  

The zool.conf

The zool.conf describes which keys should be deployed to which servers. It supports group, role and server directives.

[group devs]
  members = peter, paul, danny

[group sysadmins]
  members = tony, frank

[role app]
  servers = 10.12.11.1, 10.12.11.2
  keys = &devs, tony
  user : my_deploy_user
  password : mypassword

[server 10.11.1.4]
  keys = &sysadmins
  user = adminuser

The members are specified as the name of the keyfile containing the key, without the succeeding .pub extension. A group groups several keys, a role groups several servers. A server, well, is a single server. (Note: you can have servers in several groups and even in an additional server directive at once) Roles and servers can have multiple keys. The keys can be supplied like in the group directive or if you want to reference to a groups keys, by prepending a & (if you would want to reference the group devs you would use &devs). You can optionally specify the user/password to use to connect to servers/roles. If those values aren't configured, it defaults to root for the user and an empty password/tries to authenticate with the current users ssh key.

NOTE Currently the first appearance of a server in the key file sets its user/password. So it is not possible to have multiple key configurations with a different user for a single server. That might change soon!

Security?

When zool creates a authorized_keys file on a server, it always creates a backup of the existing one (it uses authorized_keys_timestamp as the backups filename). It also opens a backup connection to the server before uploading the keyfiles and tries to open another one after uploading them. If it fails to open another conncetion it uses the backup connection to restore the original keyfile. See how it looks like if that happens:

In the logfile

INFO -- : Fetching key from 13.11.2.200
INFO -- : Trying to connect to 13.11.2.200 to see if I still have access
WARN -- : !!!!!! Could not login to server after upload operation! Rolling back !!!!!!
INFO -- : Trying to connect to 13.11.2.200 to see if I still have access
INFO -- : Backup channel connection succeeded. Assuming everything went fine!

At the command-line

NOW pray to the gods... 
Going to deploy to 13.11.2.200
Uploading...   [FAIL]
Could not connect to a Server after updating the authorized_keys file. Tried to roll back!
Error after uploading the keyfile to 13.11.2.200

Known issues

Bugs / Issues

• numbering of "similar" keys is only done when generating the key files. when writing the config files it uses the unnumbered version all the time
• tests on the fallback mechanism are not present

Feature Todos

• generating the config from a serverpool / hostfile is pretty dump at the moment. is doesn't use the groups and roles directives, instead stupidly adds server directives with the appropriate keys. That could be made smarter...
• if keys are in subfolders, the subfolders could automatically act as usable groups, with the folder name as reference

Developing

Bundler

To get a working development/testing setup you can use bundler to fetch all the dependencies. Just gem install bundler and bundle install in the checkout directory afterwards. Be sure to use the bundle exec command to invoke stuff like rake / cucumber (bundle exec rake).

Running the tests

To run the cucumber features you need to have an ssh server running on your machine and your own public key in your authorized_keys file. The tests use your authorized_keys file only to login to localhost and fake authorized_keys and key files for testing.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010 Pascal Friederich. See LICENSE for details.