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I have an OPNsense 19.1 virtual firewall, which is based on FreeBSD 11.2 HBSD (HardenedBSD).

I added it to Ansible Server inventory (with the right configurations), and once copied the PK to that BSD /root/.ssh/authorized_keys, I can connect to it (yes, running commands as root, it is in an isolated training environment).

The issue is that when I reboot or turn off and on the machine, that authorized_keys file disappears.

The file permissions are 600 (-rw-------).

Do you know why this happens and how to solve it? As far as I could see, in a normal FreeBSD I think there's no problem in having authorized_keys file in the root account...

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  • Could it be that a root home is mounted as tmpfs? Run mount without arguments to check.
    – arrowd
    Commented Apr 4, 2019 at 10:08
  • I already checked that, it is not, indeed, other files I edit in /root remain there, and even the .ssh/known_hosts file
    – xCovelus - Слава Україні
    Commented Apr 4, 2019 at 10:54

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To solve the issue, I'm afraid, you'll have to fight OPNsense 19.1 and find out how OPNsense handles roots authorized_keys.

The issue is that when I reboot or turn off and on the machine, that authorized_keys file disappears.

But there is an option to ssh as a non-root user and sudo su. This is a better practice especially with Ansible. Ansible needs the remote user to use /bin/sh. By default FreeBSD root uses /bin/csh. Ansible best practice is to ssh as a remote_user and escalate privilege (become: yes) to root (become_user: root).

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