Re: Accessing libvirtd remotely as non-root user

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On 06/12/2015 03:48 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 05:26:20PM -0500, Dan Mossor wrote:
I manage libvirtd on a few remote machines, and my security policies require
me to disable root login via SSH. Up to this point, I've been using root due
to the systems being in staging, but this is the final step before they're
moved to production.

What is the current proscribed method of connecting virt-manager or virsh to
a remote system with a non-root account? I keep getting "authentication
failed: no agent is available to authenticate" with a user that is in the
kvm and qemu groups on the systems I've tried using the ssh transport.

This guide ought to help you set it up

    http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/SSHPolicyKitSetup

Regards,
Daniel

Ok, so I finally got it working.

The SSHPolicyKitSetup page at the libvirt wiki states right at the top that "As of polkit 0.106 the .pkla format is no more, and these configuration files must be written in Javascript."

Further down the page, it reinforces this statement with "The information in this section is obsolete; see the top of this page for more information."

However, both of those statements are incorrect. Following the directions provided by [1] from the wiki page produced zero results - the operation still failed with "authentication failed: no agent is available to authenticate" when attempting to connect.

Various hits from a Google search on that specific error string found _plenty_ of recent forum posts (recent as in less than 6 months old) with the exact same issue as me, with zero solutions. I did see one promising thing in passing that polkit-pkla-compat is still shipped by default as part of the polkit suite.

So, further digging led me to [2], which in essence was the section of the libvirtd wiki page that the page claimed was obsolete. Creating the .pkla authorization file finally enabled non-root privileged user management of a remote KVM host.

Now, the next step is to tie the polkit authorization into LDAP. More research....

Dan

[1] http://goldmann.pl/blog/2012/12/03/configuring-polkit-in-fedora-18-to-access-virt-manager/

[2] https://fedorapeople.org/groups/docs/cookbook/#access-to-libvirt-without-root-privileges

--
Dan Mossor, RHCSA
Systems Engineer
Fedora Server WG | Fedora KDE WG | Fedora QA Team
Fedora Infrastructure Apprentice
FAS: dmossor IRC: danofsatx
San Antonio, Texas, USA

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