CruiseControl.net connecting to BitBucket using SSH and running as a service

Question

here's my situation.

I'm running Cruise Control as a Windows Service and trying to get it to connect to a Mercurial Repository on BitBucket over SSH.

I'm pretty sure that everything's configured OK (PuttyGen, Pagaent, etc). I'm remoting onto the server using the same account that I am using to run the service and if I issue hg pull -b ssh://@bitbucket.org// from a command line everything works. I added -v to the ssh configuration in mercurial.ini and I can see all of the steps that are taken.

If I run CC.NET from a command prompt then it builds fine. In the console window I can see the same logging from the SSH operation.

However, if I run CC.NET as a service (using the same user account that I'm logged in on) the call to BitBucket times out. I can find no way to work out why either. The build log doesn't help and neither do ccnet.log or ccnet.trace in the temp directory. I was expecting one of them to contain the logging from the SSH operation, but they don't.

Can anyone help? Is it that running as a service prevents it from connecting to Pagaent (I've started Pagaent by adding it to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run). When I did the pull from the command line I had to OK a dialog, but only once. Is it waiting on the same dialog now that it's running as a service?

Getting close to my wits end here.

Thanks

Answer 1

I did get it working in the end. The trick was to create the public key without a passphrase. When running as a service the solution has to be completely non-interactive and the passphrase option with pagaent.exe just isn't.

Here are the steps:

• Use PutTTygen to generate a secure key WITHOUT a passphrase. If you really do need one then you can add it to the mercurial.ini file, but defeats the point for me as it's in plain sight anyway.

• Copy a mercurial.ini to two locations: C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile and C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile. Probably only one of these was really necessary, but I didn't have the time to experiment. The first is the home directory for the system user when running 64 bit apps, the SysWOW64 location for 32 bit. Make sure that if you do the same as me then keep both files in sync - or go one further and work out which is the correct location.

• Add something like this line under the [ui] key in both files: ssh = "D:\Program Files\TortoiseHg\TortoisePlink.exe" -ssh -2 -C -batch -v -i "[Path to your ppk file]" Add the passphrase to the end of the command if one was created in step 1. Make sure that TortoisePlink.exe is specified, not Plink.exe. They should both be in the same directory.

• Download psexec from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb842062.aspx

• Run d:\PSTools\PsExec.exe -s -i cmd.exe. This will open a command line as the system account in interactive mode.

• Now do an hg pull, or hg clone or whatever.

• A dialog should pop up with a confirmation message. This is a one time thing and the reason that you have to do the PsExec step. OK the dialog.

Now cc.net should be able to be run as a service under the local system account using SSH!