Vagrant ssh promtps for password

Question

I have a strange problem with vagrant ssh. Similar questions, like Vagrant asks for password after SSH key update, or (vagrant & ssh) require password, or Vagrant ssh authentication failure do not help me.

So, the plot.

I have a virtual machine running Ubuntu 14.04.3. All setup was made according to this article: https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/building-a-vagrant-box.

Note: I can ssh to this virtual machine using Putty with vagrant's insecure_private_key (converted to *.ppk), which is located "C:/Users/Gino/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key. Password is not promtped.

Then I packaged this virtual machine, init vagrant with this package and ran vagrant up. I got "Warning: Authentication failure. Retrying..." error. But nevertheless I could vagrant ssh to this machine, but it asked me a password. And if I tried to ssh to it using Putty with the necessary key (as in the first paragraph), it asked me for a password too.

I vagrant halted this machine, found it in VirtualBox VM's list and ran it manually. After that I tried to ssh to this machine using Putty with the same key and succeed - I could logon without any password.

Result of vagrant ssh-config, if needed:

h:\VagrantBoxes\main-server32>vagrant ssh-config
Host default
  HostName 127.0.0.1
  User vagrant
  Port 2222
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  PasswordAuthentication no
  IdentityFile "C:/Users/Gino/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key"
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  LogLevel FATAL

My Vagrantfile (it was generated automatically, almost nothing there, only a suggested line from comments was added):

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "vagrant-main-server32"

  config.ssh.insert_key = false
end

So what's the mystery here? Why ssh using key works without vagrant up and fails and prompts for password with it?

Note. Another funny thing: it still can not authenticate during vagrant up. But if at the time when errors "authentication failure" appear I log in to vm through virtualbox, it also succeed to log in in the window with vagrant up. And then vagrant ssh works.

Answer 1

I had the same issue with vagrant 1.8.1, on several boxes I use (ie: geerlingguy/centos6)

I didn't have any problem with Vagrant 1.7 on those boxes.

After some research on why i could not ssh in that box, it appears that /home/vagrant on the box had 755 permissions and ssh prevent authentication to user with those permissions

extract of /var/log/secure:

Jan 28 15:11:36 server sshd[11721]: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /home/vagrant

To fix that vm, I only have to change the permissions /home/vagrant (did a chmod 700 on it) and now i can ssh directly into my boxes

I don't knwo how to fix it directly I think you should modify your box directly

Hope this helps!

edit: I thought it was a shared folder from the host but it's /vagrant that is shared not /home/vagrant