Public Key for users with no domain

So I found the documentation to create a user without a domain. How To Create a WHM Reseller Without an Associated Domain

The question is how do I assign ssh keys to this username?

 

I followed your steps but after seeing the result I think there is some confusion. I am looking to close root from login. I am then looking at disabling passwords. I would like to create a user that I can use for this task. I have a user that has been created and has no domain attached to it. It is in the wheel group so it has su access. I need to add keys to this user so I can login without a password. I have already created a .ssh directory and an authorized_key file. With your step there is now a public and a private key generated as well. I figured that adding a authorized key file would do the trick but that didn't work.

 

The Authorized keys file already had my key and anyone else who had a key that needed access.

Now that all that is out of the way, any other ideas?

 

Let me be more specific on your step.

I added all of the keys I would like imported to authorized keys into the .ssh folder. I can't add those keys because the user doesn't own a domain. For example a user was created through ssh but owns no domain using this setup method How To Create a WHM Reseller Without an Associated Domain

I then used your line to add the key to authorized keys. ssh-copy-id -i /home/username/.ssh/myName.pub username

I think the username should probably be username@hostname.com however this user has no associated domain. Does that make sense?

 

Ok let me take a step back. We have public keys setup on a lot of other servers (even other cPanel servers) but this situation seems to be different. We have all of the public keys in a list. We added all of those keys inside of authorized_keys, restarted sshd and then tried to login. It still asked for a password for that user.

I then tried to add individual .pub files for each user (essentially copying what some of our other cpanel servers public key records look like). Restarted sshd and then tried to login. It still asked for a password. I am pretty sure that anything

is really just adding items that already exist because I manually put them in to the authorized_keys file already.

It seems like in a cPanel system that another step needs to be taken, since there is no GUI to interact with because the user has been created in ssh and has no domain assigned to the user. We have given the new user reseller privileges so we can see the user there, however we can't add keys or authorize keys on the front end. So the question really is, is there a way to authorize a key in ssh besides adding it to the authorized_keys file?

This seems really trivial but I feel like I am missing something. Thank you for the help.

 

I removed the user and created a user with a fake domain and it took care of the issue. This method won't work for dns only but it will have to do for the time being. Maybe when I find more time I will open a ticket. This problem carries through all 5 of our cpanel servers.