Re: ssh is awesome

["James L. Burke" <jburke@meadowbrook-farms.com>]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 09:40:52PM -0600, Chester Langin wrote:
> Aside from the crypto, ssh is a virtual
> network file system, actually Internet
> file system.  For each host, I configure
> an alias and username.  I set up the keys
> and activate ssh-agent.  Then, I can access
> any of these machines from home as easy as
> typing...
> 
> ssh alias
> 
> I can copy files between remote machines
> from my home as easy as this...
> 
> scp alias1:filename alias2
> 
> That's it.  No signons or passwords.  This
> has eliminated the need for a lot of expect
> script for me.
> 
> Thanks Steve for being such a salesman on
> this (even though it took me several months
> to implement it).

After hearing from both Steve and Chester, I finally got around to trying to implement ssh & scp using public/private key authentication instead of password authentication.  I use ssh all the time so I thought it would easy ... not a chance.

Actually, the only thing that I couldn't get from the various man pages was the fact that although the rsa1 standard is the default with ssh-keygen, this doesn't seem to work right out of the box (at least on my box - Red Hat 7.2 kernel 2.4.9-13) ... when I finally thought to run ssh with the "-v" option I saw that ssh was trying rsa2 and dsa, but not rsa1 ... when I re-ran ssh-keygen with "-t rsa" I got an rsa2 key that worked great.

If anyone wants help with this from an amateur, let me know ... I must admit, it is nice to move back and forth from home to work on-line without constantly typing passwords.  Also, ssh makes X11 forwarding really easy ...

jburke.

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