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How to authenticate clients with the Multipass service

See also: authenticate, local.passphrase, Service

Multipass requires clients to be authenticated with the service before allowing commands to complete.

Setting the passphrase

The administrator needs to set a passphrase for clients to authenticate with the Multipass service. The client setting the passphrase will need to already be authenticated.

There are two ways to proceed:

  • Set the passphrase with an echoless interactive entry, where the passphrase is hidden from view:

    multipass set local.passphrase

    The system will then prompt you to enter a passphrase:

    Please enter passphrase:
Please re-enter passphrase:

  • Set the passphrase in the command line, where the passphrase is visible:

    multipass set local.passphrase=foo

Authenticating the client

A client that is not authorized to connect to the Multipass service will fail when running multipass commands. An error will be displayed when this happens.

For example, if you try running the multipass list command:

list failed: The client is not authenticated with the Multipass service.
Please use 'multipass authenticate' before proceeding.

At this time, the client will need to provide the previously set passphrase. This can be accomplished in two ways:

  • Authenticate with an echoless interactive entry, where the passphrase is hidden from view:

    multipass authenticate

    The system will prompt you to enter the passphrase:

    Please enter passphrase:

  • Authenticate in the command line, where the passphrase is visible:

    multipass authenticate foo

Troubleshooting

Here you can find solutions and workarounds for common issues that may arise.

The client cannot be authorized and the passphrase cannot be set

It is possible that another client that is privileged to connect to the Multipass socket will connect first and make it seemingly impossible to set the local.passphrase and also authorize the client with the service.

If this is the case, you will see something like the following when you run:

  • multipass list

    list failed: The client is not authenticated with the Multipass service.
Please use 'multipass authenticate' before proceeding.

  • multipass authenticate

    Please enter passphrase: 
authenticate failed: Passphrase is not set. Please `multipass set 
local.passphrase` with a trusted client.

  • multipass set local.passphrase

    Please enter passphrase: 
Please re-enter passphrase: 
set failed: The client is not authenticated with the Multipass service.
Please use 'multipass authenticate' before proceeding.

This may not even work when using sudo.

The following workaround should help get out of this situation:

cat ~/snap/multipass/current/data/multipass-client-certificate/multipass_cert.pem | sudo tee -a /var/snap/multipass/common/data/multipassd/authenticated-certs/multipass_client_certs.pem > /dev/null
snap restart multipass

You may need sudo with this last command: sudo snap restart multipass.

At this point, your client should be authenticated with the Multipass service.

Errors or typos? Topics missing? Hard to read? Let us know or open an issue on GitHub.

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Last updated 3 months ago. Help improve this document in the forum.