ssh and welcome/warning banner

[Vic S. Kelan]

Hello Friends!

I am trying to secure my server by disallowing telnet connection. I intend to use only ssh. The problem I have is with the banner (/etc/issue).

under telnet I can get my banner messages at login but not under ssh.

I have added the following line to all the sshd_config files I could find but still no dice:
# no default banner path
Banner /etc/issue
the files i edited are:
/opt/ssh/newconfig/opt/ssh/etc/sshd_config
/opt/ssh/src/ssh/etc/sshd_config
/opt/ssh/src/ssh/sshd_config
/opt/ssh/etc/sshd_config

i have restarted ssh, no luck.
How can I configure ssh to show me the banner at login?

thanks!!

[Mel Burslan · Accepted solution]

sheck your ssh command to see if there is any wrapper around it to direct the stderr to /dev/null as the /etc/issue contents are treated as error messages. For example, from server1 I want to ssh to server2:

server1> ssh server2
(I see the /etc/issue)

server1> ssh server2 2>/dev/null
(I can not see the /etc/issue)

otherwise, unless your sshd is looking for its configuration file from some other location with another filename, you should be able to see it. to make sure if this is the case or not, kill the sshd the restart it as

/opt/ssh/bin/sshd -f /opt/ssh/etc/sshd_config

this definitel will you the file you modified according to your post.

HTH

[Vic S. Kelan]

Thanks I got it to work, my silly mistake, unlike the banner with telnet, i needed to input a username first before it displayed the banner......

Wonder if thats normal though....

[Mel Burslan]

yes it is normal. Igenerally ssh to the remote servers as follows:

ssh mel@server

and drop to the password prompt directly. So, if issue gets displayed prior to username, I will have no way of seeing it. I think it is intentionally designed with this utilization in mind.

[Juan M Leon]

I will suggest to look into /etc/dt/config/C
Xresources file, you can enter your warning messages there.

Hope it helps