The high performance computing (HPC) cluster (called Mox) at Univ. of Washington (UW) frustratingly requires a password when SSH-ing, even when SSH keys are in use. I have a lengthy, unintelligible password that I use for my UW account, so having to type this in any time I want to initiate a new SSH session on Mox is a painful process.

Today, I finally got fed up with how much time I was wasting (granted, it’s minor in the grand scheme of my day) just logging in to Mox, so I spent some time figuring out how to automate password entry for a new SSH session with Mox.

I tried to handle this using the program sshpass, but I couldn’t get it to read my password from a file – it would just hang in limbo after executing the command.

In the end, I came across a bash script that does this perfectly. Steps to implement this on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS:

1. Install expect:

   sudo apt install expect

2. Create following script (taken from this StackExchange solution):

   
   #!/usr/bin/expect
   
   spawn ssh mox
   expect "Password:"
   send "<UW_password>\r"
   interact
   

   NOTES:

   • I have an ~/.ssh/config file that allows me to use “mox” as an alias for my full SSH command

   • Replace with your own UW password.

3. Change access to script (set read, write, execute for user only):

   chmod u=rwx,go-rwx

4. Run script from home directory (saved in home directory):

   ./mox.sh

Boom! No having to track down password, copy, and paste!