SSH Access to Server

Your live web site will very likely be on a machine far away that is not under your control. You can connect to the remote end using telnet and run a terminal emulator on your machine, but when you type in the essential root password to get control of the far server, the password goes across the web unencrypted. This is not a good idea.

You therefore need to access it through a secure shell over the Web so that all your traffic is encrypted. Not only your passwords are protected, but also, say, a new version of your client database with all their credit card numbers and account details that you are uploading. The Bad Guys might like to intercept it, but they will not be able to.

You need two software elements to do all this:

  1. Secure shell: free from OpenSSH at www.openssh.org or expensive at http://www.ssh.com.

  2. A terminal emulator that will tunnel through ssh to the target machine and make it seem to you that you have the target’s operating system prompt on your desktop. If you are running Win32, we have found that Mindterm (http://www.mindbright.se) works well enough, though it is written in Java and you need to install the JDK. When our version starts up, it throws alarming-looking Java fatal errors, but these don’t seem to matter. A good alternative is Putty: ...

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