SSH - Secure Shell

The ssh command allows for connecting to remote machines to run programs and transfer files.

Talks

Working Remotely With SSH (Chicago.PM 2018)

This talk introduces SSH to anyone who isn't familiar and demonstrates the basic use-cases of logging in, generating and using SSH keys, transferring files over SSH, and running the SSH agent.

There is also some discussion of the SSH config file, how SSH agent forwarding works (and why to use it), and how to set up SSH tunnels (and why).

This is a good exploration of the basics of SSH needed to get useful work done, and an introduction to some of the more useful advanced SSH features.

Presenter's Notes

This talk went well and lasted about an hour. The section explaining symmetric and asymmetric cryptography was extraneous and irrelevant and resulted in a lengthy digression. I don't know enough about them to explain them, and that's often seen as an invitation for someone else to do so (despite it being very clearly not relevant). This part should be removed from future talks.

Errata: The ssh-copy-id is not part of the OpenSSH distribution, and is a shell script that Linux and MacOS include for ease-of-use.

External Resources

• OpenSSH documentation

Related Topics

tmux - Terminal Multiplexer

Using Tmux on a system you've logged in to with SSH allows you to run programs without worrying about your programs being stopped if you get disconnected. The programs you run inside a Tmux session will remain running, and you can re-connect to the server and re-attach to your Tmux session.

Often my first step after logging in to a machine is running a Tmux session just in case.

screen - Terminal Window Manager

Much like Tmux, screen lets you run programs, disconnect from the server, and then reconnect later to continue your work.

rsync - Advanced file transfer

The rsync command uses SSH (and other protocols) to synchronize files between servers. This is a more powerful tool than scp for tasks like mirroring data and backups.