sKunKbad

Authentication for CodeIgniter can be handled by a few different libraries, depending on what version of CodeIgniter you are using. If you are using 3.X, then you might try Community Auth: https://community-auth.com It's probably way over your head, but it works great. Another popular choice is Ion Auth. I don't have experience with Ion Auth, so I can't tell you about it.

I was thinking that being able to start and stop the ssh tunneling would be nice to do with php, but after investigation I'm just going to use autossh and keep the ssh tunnel open permanently. Since the server will be using the connection at all hours of the day and night, I don't think it could hurt to keep it open.

I did figure it out. The user running shell_exec, in my case www-data, needed its own self-created rsa key. I guess when I initially created it I didn't create it as www-data, so it didn't work. All is well now.

PC is just a development environment, but production server is also Ubuntu, so figured if it works on dev it should work on production. I'm supposed to create an application on that production machine that can do mysql queries on that "castrated" server. I cannot make a secure connection with MySQL because that castrated server is not set up for that. I think this might be my only option.

I see all over the internet tutorials that are basically saying that setting up the ssh tunnel for mysql is easy, but I get an error, and no joy: Host key verification failed This error is in a log file that I created. I am attempting to use PHP's shell_exec on my Ubuntu desktop: shell_exec('ssh -p 2233 -f -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 acct@remote-server.com sleep 60 >> ./ssh.logfile 2>&1'); So, pretty standard according to the internet, but it's not working for me. 1) The remote server is a hosted website. It's a "semi-dedicated" plan, and just a glorified shared hosting account. 2) I can already do a passwordless SSH connection to the remote server by using the terminal. So my key based authentication is working for me. 3) I use SQLyog (MySQL tunneling through SSH) to this remote server. It's not key based, but the tunnel is there. 4) The host was not helpful. They were trying (I think), but nothing worked. 5) Yes, the remote server requires SSH connections on port 2233. Why is this failing? I need somebody to walk me through this. I saw somewhere online that the error message may mean that apache was not able to check a known_hosts file. I created an .ssh directory at /var/www/.ssh, and I put a known hosts file in there. Chowned these to www-data:www-data. Permission set at 600. Don't know what else to do or check.