Ansible Role: Known Hosts

I have a git repository with public SSH keys which I believe to be correct. These keys belong to services that I use regularly on different machines. To save me from having to check the keys every time I use one of these services on a new machine, I set up this role. It clones my git repo to /etc/ssh/known_hosts.d/ and then creates a link called /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts that points to the ssh_known_hosts file in that repo.

This way there are system-wide known hosts that are known to any user of the system. Additionally each user can have their own additional known hosts in ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

Note: Before using public SSH keys that someone hosts anywhere, you should make sure that you absolutely trust that person or that you have validated the keys yourselves. You can read more about why and how for example here and here

Requirements

None

Role Variables

The following variables can be found in vars/main.yml.

• known_hosts_repo_local_destination: Location to which the known host repo will be cloned.
• known_hosts_file_name: Name of the system-wide known host file.
• known_hosts_link_path: Path of the link to the known host file.

The following variables can be found in defaults/main.yml:

known_hosts_repo: URL to the repo holding the public ssh keys. known_hosts_repo_version: Version of the repo to be cloned. known_hosts_repo_remote_name: Name of the remote in the cloned repo.

Dependencies

None

Example Playbook

- hosts: servers
  roles:
     - { role: schuam.known_hosts }

License

MIT

Author Information

This role was created in 2022 by Andreas Schuster.