This is a short summary what you need to avoid any type of interaction when accessing a machine by SSH.

Interaction Pitfalls:

  • Known hosts entry is missing.
  • Known hosts entry is incorrect.
  • Public key is incorrect or missing.
  • Keyboard Authentication is enabled when public key failed.
  • stdin is connected and the remote command waits for input.

Here is what you need to do to circumvent everything:

  • Ensure to use the correct public key (if necessary pass it using -i)
  • Ensure to pass "-o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null" to avoid termination when the known hosts key has changed (Note: this is highly insecure when used for untrusted machines! But it might make sense in setups without correctly maintained known_hosts)
  • Ensure to pass "-o StrictHostKeyChecking=no" to avoid SSH complaining about missing known host keys (caused by using /dev/null as input).
  • Pass "-o PreferredAuthentications=publickey" to avoid password querying when the public key doesn't work
  • Pass "-n" to avoid remote interaction

    • Example command line: 

    ssh -i my_priv_key -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey [email protected] -n "/bin/ls"