Authentication Options for Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Operations

Some RHPCTL commands show authentication choices as an optional parameter.

Specifying an authentication option is not required when running an RHPCTL command on an Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Client, nor when running an RHPCTL command on the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server and operating on an Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Client, because the server and client establish a trusted relationship when the client is created, and authentication is handled internally each time a transaction takes place. (The only condition for server/client communication under which an authentication option must be specified is when the server is provisioning a new Oracle Grid Infrastructure deployment—in this case, the client does not yet exist.)

To operate on a target that is not an Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Client, you must provide the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server with information allowing it to authenticate with the target. The options are as follows:

Provide the root password (on stdin) for the target
Provide the sudo user name, sudo binary path, and the password (stdin) for target
Provide a password (either root or sudouser) non-interactively from local encrypted store (using the -cred authentication parameter)
Provide a path to the identity file stored on the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server for SSL-encrypted passwordless authentication (using the -auth sshkey option)

Passwordless Authentication Details

The Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server can authenticate to targets over SSH using a key pair. To enable this option, you must establish user equivalence between the crsusr on the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server and root or a sudouser on the target.

Note:

The steps to create that equivalence are platform-dependent and so not shown in detail here. For Linux, see commands ssh-keygen to be run on the target and ssh-copy-id to be run on the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server.

For example, assuming that you have established user equivalency between crsusr on the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server and root on the target node, nonRHPClient4004.example.com, and saved the key information on the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server at /home/oracle/rhp/ssh-key/key -path, then the following command will provision a copy of the specified gold image to the target node with passwordless authentication:

$ rhpctl add workingcopy -workingcopy db12102_160607wc1 -image db12102_160607
  -targetnode nonRHPClient4004.example.com -path /u01/app/oracle/12.1/rhp/dbhome_1
  -oraclebase /u01/app/oracle -auth sshkey -arg1 user:root -arg2
   identity_file:/home/oracle/rhp/ssh-key/key

For equivalency between crsusr on the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server and a privileged user (other than root) on the target, the -auth portion of the command would be similar to the following:

-auth sshkey -arg1 user:ssh_user -arg2 identity_file:path_to_identity_file_on_RHPS
 -arg3 sudo_location:path_to_sudo_binary_on_target