[mdlug] Programatically Answering a Password Prompt

[Gregory Czerniak]

Hi Greg,

    I believe you can solve your problem more elegantly by using a
keytab file to supply credentials to Kerberos rather than trying to
pipe a password into kinit.
    Here are two tutorials on how to do this:

- http://www.microhowto.info/howto/add_a_host_or_service_principal_to_a_keytab_using_mit_kerberos.html
- http://xteams.oit.ncsu.edu/iso/node/814

Thanks,
Greg Czerniak

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 12:38 PM, Wojtak, Greg
<GregWojtak at quickenloans.com> wrote:
> I’m writing  a python script and part of it is calling kinit to get a kerberos ticket before doing some ldap operations.  I’m trying to find a method to pass the password into my script, and I haven’t been able to reliably do this.  Depending on the distribution of Linux and the version of that distribution, I’ve found that different versions of kinit will read the password:
>
>
>   *   From STDIN
>   *   From a file descriptor dup()’ed from STDIN
>   *   By opening /dev/tty and polling directly for key presses/input
>
> I have been able to get the first two cases covered, but I am at a loss as to how to get the third case going.  I’ve even tried firing off the kinit and then writing directly to /dev/tty, but as expected, that does not work.  If it helps, I am using the python subprocess module with Popen to run kinit, but as far as I know, there is no method to redirect anything other than file descriptors 0, 1, and 2 with Popen.
>
> Does anyone have any insight into this?  Even if you’re not a python programmer, if you know how this is working, any insight you could give would be much appreciated.
>
> TIA,
>
> Greg
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