SSHing with the nobody user

I am on FreeBSD. Essentially, I am trying to have a php script (run by apache) ssh into another machine. I am running into the problem that nobody does not have a .ssh configuration file and so am getting the error:

Could not create directory '/nonexistent/.ssh'. Host key verification failed.

Is there a way to work around this? Bonus points if you can do this without root access so I do not need to pay my web hosting company to do this.

Thanks.

Solution 1:

Try to start ssh with the following options:

ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no ...

That way, ssh doesn't try to load and create the .ssh/known_hosts file.

Solution 2:

The entire idea behind user nobody is that he has almost no rights on the host. Nobody is not part of any group. Nobody has no home directory.

Without homedir there is no .ssh dir in a homedir. So this is not going to work as nobody.

Possibly you can run the process under an other user? (Though that would require creating another user, which requires root access. Which you stated as undesirable.