Home > Servers > Systems Management > White Papers > Dell PowerEdge: Getting Started with Redfish Ansible Modules > Setting up SSH for Ansible
SSH is a critical piece in any Ansible-managed and controlled infrastructure because Ansible relies on it to perform actions on the hosts. Not using dedicated clients is what makes Ansible easy to use and implement, but it creates the requirement of having a robust and properly configured SSH infrastructure.
The biggest part of getting SSH ready for Ansible is enabling key-based authentication, which allows Ansible to access the remote hosts without the need for a password being entered.
If you are going to use Ansible solely to manage PowerEdge iDRACs through Redfish, you do not have to set up SSH. Redfish uses its own authentication method and does not rely on SSH. However, you must set up SSH key-based authentication to run playbooks against any Windows or Linux server.
In SSH, the source and the destination of the SSH session conduct key-based authentication by sharing public and private keys to authenticate the session, instead of using a password. Enable key-based authentication from the server, workstation, or desktop from which you will run Ansible by following these steps:
We recommend that you enter a passphrase when prompted. The passphrase protects the private key and limits the possibilities of that private key being compromised.
This command copies the public key to <remote host> and establishes key-based authentication for user <username>.