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Connect to Edge Host Using Remote Shell

Edge hosts deployed in remote locations are often difficult to access. Traditional troubleshooting tools such as kubectl rely on the Kubernetes API being available, which is not always the case in an outage. Palette allows you to use a remote shell session to access your connected Edge host. This connection operates on the Operating System (OS) level and does not require Kubernetes to be available.

Diagram of the relationship between user, Palette, and Edge host in Remote Shell

tech preview
This is a Tech Preview feature and is subject to change. Do not use this feature in production workloads.

You can generate temporary user credentials with root privileges or use an existing user on your Edge host. Temporary users have root privilege on the Edge host, allowing you the permissions often required to troubleshoot, but they must be enabled per Edge host by someone with sufficient permissions.

Prerequisites​

  • An Edge host registered with your Palette account. The Edge host may or may not be part of an Edge cluster.

  • You are logged in as a Palette user who has the edgehost.sshUpdate permission in the project to which the Edge host is associated.

  • If you wish to enable temporary user generation, you also need the edgehost.sshUserUpdate permission. For more information, refer to Permissions.

Procedure​

Enable Remote Shell​

  1. Log in to Palette.

  2. From the left Main Menu, select Clusters.

  3. In the Clusters view, select the Edge hosts tab.

  4. Select the Edge host you want to open a remote shell session to.

  5. In the upper-right corner, click on Settings. Then click Edit.

  6. Turn on Remote shell. This will allow you to open a remote shell session to the Edge host from Palette. You will need the credentials from the host to log in. The privileges you have on the host depends on the user credentials you used to log in to the host.

  7. (Optional) You may also turn on Create temporary username and password. Turning this on will allow you to connect to the Edge host with root privileges without needing credentials for the Edge host itself. This action requires the edgehost.sshUserUpdate permission.

    warning

    If you open a shell session with temporary credentials and then disable temporary user generation, the current session will remain open for up to one minute before the shell times out and the temporary user is deleted.

  8. Click OK to apply changes.

Connect to Host​

  1. On the Edge host page, the Remote Shell field will show Enabled. Click Connect.

  2. If you did not turn on Create temporary username and password, you will be asked to enter the credentials for the Edge host as well as the port you want to connect to. Edge hosts use the standard port 22 for SSH connections unless you have configured otherwise.

    If you turned on Create temporary username and password, Palette will generate temporary credentials for you automatically, and you only need to select the port used to connect to the host.

  3. Click Confirm to start the session.

Validate​

  1. In the remote shell, issue the following command.

    whoami

  2. Confirm that you are logged in as the expected user.