Script to change password on linux servers over ssh

Question

We have a number of Red Hat linux servers in our IT environment. I am being asked by my team members to write a script (preferably shell script) to change a user\'s password

Answer 1

Thought I should put my solution in an answer field - not sure if this should be a part of the question..

OK, I have put together a partially working solution using Dennis' suggestion.

servers.txt looks like:

server1
server2
server3
.
.
.

I am using:

for server in `cat servers.txt`; do
ssh $server -l user 'passwd <<EOF
old_pass
new_pass
new_pass
EOF';
done

This produces:

user@server1's password: **<Type password manually>**
(current) UNIX password: New UNIX password: Retype new UNIX password: Changing password for user user.
Changing password for user
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
user@server2's password: **<Type password manually>**
(current) UNIX password: New UNIX password: Retype new UNIX password: Changing password for user user.
Changing password for user
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

So here, I still need to type my old password once for each server. Can this be avoided?

Answer 2

Have you tried App::Unix::RPasswd

Answer 3

If you have ssh, why have passwords in the first place? Push the user's public ssh key to all the servers they're authorized to use and be done with it. This also lets you easily grant and revoke access all you want.

At a previous $dayjob, where we had literally tens of thousands of servers, they had a database of which engineers were allowed on which servers, and the installation of ssh keys was an automated process. Almost NOBODY had a password on ANY machine.

Answer 4

echo -e "wakka2\nwakka2\n" | passwd root

Answer 5

You do not need root access to use passwd.

This shoud work just fine.

passwd <<EOF
old password
new password
new password
EOF