Cron job running but not establishing tunnel

Question

I have a script which establishes a reverse tunnel on an endpoint HostB. It looks like this:

cat tun.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Test code
/usr/bin/ssh -V 1> /home/userA/bin/tun.stdout 2> /home/userA/bin/tun.stderr

# Establish tunnel
createTunnel() {
    /usr/bin/ssh -R *:19999:localhost:22 userB@hostB
}

# Do nothing if tunnel is already established
/usr/bin/ssh -p 19999 userA@hostB true
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
    createTunnel
fi

when I run it manually like ./tun.sh it works, and I can see on HostB, that userA is logged in. If I run it again on HostA but from another console, it works as expected - it does not launch a second tunnel.

Everything so far is good.

I now edit my crontab to look like this:

crontab -l

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/1 *   *   *   *   /home/userA/bin/tun.sh

It runs the script every minut. This should be fine, since the script terminates if the tunnel is already established.

However, now userA does not get logged in as when I run it manually from the console.

The test code in the top of the script confirms that the script is being called, and that it has permission to execute /usr/bin/ssh:

~/bin$ ls

tun.sh  tun.stderr  tun.stdout

~/bin$ cat tun.stderr

OpenSSH_5.3p1 Debian-3ubuntu7, OpenSSL 0.9.8k 25 Mar 2009

~/bin$ cat tun.stdout

[empty]

For some reason -V writes to stderr and not stdout, but that is a detail. The main point is here that the script is being executed every minute.

My question is: why is the SSH tunnel not established?

I see an unquoted globbing character in /usr/bin/ssh -R *:19999:localhost:22 userB@hostB... Need not be the problem but that is a quite direct way to shell hell. — Hauke Laging
– Hauke Laging, Commented May 14, 2014 at 13:03
if you’re using ssh-agent, you need the cron job to have the evironment variables to let it find the ssh-agent process — Andrew McGuinness
– Andrew McGuinness, Commented May 14, 2014 at 13:04
ssh-agent seems to be the right pointer. I will post an answer when I have set this up correctly. — Einar
– Einar, Commented May 14, 2014 at 14:45

Einar · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-17 07:01:36Z

Thanks to @Andrew for pointing to ssh-agent. As far as I can see, if one wants to be able to establish the tunnel without having to enter a password each time, the password must be stored or removed. I chose to remove it. For the record, here are some clean-ups based on the comments I got:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Establish tunnel
createTunnel() {
    /usr/bin/ssh -i /home/laptopuser/.ssh/id_rsa_tunnel -R 2200:localhost:22 [email protected]
}

# Do nothing if tunnel is already established
/usr/bin/ssh -i /home/user/laptopuser/.ssh/id_rsa_tunnel -p 2200 [email protected] true
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
    createTunnel
fi

crontab:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/1 *   *   *   *   /home/laptopuser/bin/establishTunnel.sh

copy your tunnel id to the vps:

ssh-copy-id -i /home/user/laptopuser/.ssh/id_rsa_tunnel vps.com

wait until tunnel is running (see sudo watch grep CRON /var/log/syslog) and copy your normal id if you have not already got in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

ssh-copy-id vps.com -p 2200

Ideally the tunnel would run as dedicated user both on the vps and the laptop.

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