a private key is required for cloud location, but shouldn't be

[ahgittin]

cloud machine creation fails if ~/.ssh/id_rsa (or id_dsa or other private-key-file is not set)

if no getConfigRaw indicates no key is set (it was using the default) then brooklyn should just make up a key -- rather than fail

you will see warnings such as this as soon as the problem manifests (after a minute or two in AWS and GCE):

2014-01-21 01:04:57,630 WARN  Invalid files for privateKeyFile[ConfigKey:java.lang.String] (given [~/.ssh/id_rsa, ~/.ssh/id_dsa]; converted to [/Users/alex/.ssh/id_rsa, /Users/alex/.ssh/id_dsa]) may fail provisioning aws-ec2:eu-west-1@DSECassandraNodeImpl{id=JFy7fLhs}

then much later:

2014-01-21 01:11:37,459 ERROR Failed to start VM for aws-ec2:eu-west-1@DSECassandraNodeImpl{id=JFy7fLhs}: SSH failed for alex@54.217.18.62 (aws-ec2:eu-west-1@DSECassandraNodeImpl{id=JFy7fLhs}) after waiting 5m
2014-01-21 01:11:37,461 WARN  Attempt #1/1 to obtain machine threw error: java.lang.IllegalStateException: SSH failed for alex@54.217.18.62 (aws-ec2:eu-west-1@DSECassandraNodeImpl{id=JFy7fLhs}) after waiting 5m

[aledsage]

I tried to reproduce this with the tests in JcloudsLoginLiveTest (e.g. testSpecifyingNothingAndNoDefaultKeyFilesExist). That worked fine.

It did give the log.warn about invalid files for privateKeyFile because the defaults couldn't be found, but then it went on to auto-generate a random password.

Is your machine sshable with a password, or is that forbidden by default in the sshd_config perhaps?

(Note that we also call jclouds AdminAccess.lockSsh(false) when using password. Without that, jclouds would have written to /etc/ssh/sshd_config to add PasswordAuthentication no and PermitRootLogin no.)

[aledsage]

An alternative within brooklyn is that we could auto-generate an rsa key to use, rather than falling back to an auto-generated password. (this is not currently supported, but could be implemented - thoughts?)

[ahgittin]

i was using AWS with no special image selection or anything else. perhaps it does have passwords disabled? (likely the people who reported it to me were doing the same?)

+1 to generating an rsa key as the fallback