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Ivan
Asked: 2009-05-15 07:40:23 +0800 CST

Secure way to monitor and restart services that require password

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Sometimes when the power goes out and the UPS dies before it goes back on, some services on our servers don't come back up. Namely some VMware virtual machines.

I was thinking of setting up a monitoring service that will attempt to start the VMs each five minutes if they aren't running, but since the vmrun command from VMware requires a username and a password, how can I make this secure?

linux security monitoring

2 Answers

  1. Vmware Server on Linux supports setting virtual machines to power on at boot. From server console, Go VM properties :: Options Tab :: Startup/Shutdown , and the On Host Startup to Power on the Virtual Machine. I would imagine this can be done with other vmware software as well.

    EDIT: Ah well to try to actually answer your question then:-)

    When I run vmrun on my own box it doesn't ask me for a password. Maybe it only asks you for a password if you are using vmrun with the host argument (or if you need root privileges?) If this is the case, what about setting up password-less ssh using keys? Then you could just do something like ssh fooUser@myServer 'vmrun start /foo/bar/baz.vm' and that might work. If it does require higher privileges, you can give specific users permission to run specific commands with sudo and the /etc/sudoers file.

    With Nagios monitoring, you can set up event handlers that will run a script (such as the command I posted) if it detects that the host in question is in fact down.

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  2. I haven't tested this but it should work. Put your vmrun command including the password into a file and chmod it 700. You should then be able to use sudo with the NOPASSWD option to run the script;

    sudo /path/to/vmrun_script.sh

    Andrew

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