openstack team mailing list archive

[Dean Troyer <dtroyer@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 8:34 AM, Anne Gentle <anne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Can you better explain to Jamie how keypair injection works and what Compute
> API commands correspond with the Dashboard creation and association of
> keypairs?

I'll take a stab at the basic use of keypairs from the Nova CLI.  I
don't think Horizon does anything drastically different than this.

DevStack has an example in
https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack/blob/master/exercises/boot_from_volume.sh
that may be useful.  Lines 123-129 demonstrate removing an old keypair
and adding a new one with the same name. (In the DevStack case, a new
keypair is generated on every run, this is not how things normally
work, hence the delete.)  This shows how Nova will generate the pair
and return the private key as the output.  You must capture it then,
there is no way to get it later.  Line 161 shows how to use it during
the server boot process.

The other way is to use existing ssh keypairs and is how I do things
in my own scripts.  Add an existing ssh public key to Nova (set
KEYNAME to something unique, I often use `hostname`):

    # ensure keypair is present
    if ! nova keypair-list | grep -q $KEYNAME; then
        nova keypair-add --pub_key=$HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub $KEYNAME
        echo "Added keypair for $KEYNAME"
    fi
    KEY="--key-name=$KEYNAME"

Then, later in the nova boot command:

    nova boot ... $KEY ... servername

In either case you should be able to ssh directly into the instance.
In the first case (Nova generating the keypair) remember to tell ssh
to use the private file with -i <private-key-file>.

dt

--

Dean Troyer
dtroyer@xxxxxxxxx