Chapter 55. OpenSSH

I sometimes need to log in at a friend’s machine which is located about 20 miles from me. In the old days, this would be a job for the relatively insecure telnet.

But those days are gone. The Internet today is a hostile and insecure environment. Snap out of your GUI-induced haze for a few minutes, and come with me to the CLI. Let’s explore OpenSSH, which replaces telnet and does a whole lot more.

As you may remember when we discussed tcpdump, programs like telnet, rlogin, and ftp actually send your user ID and password as plain text across the network. OpenSSH provides the missing security for that risk, plus a few other really nifty things.

OpenSSH includes several programs:

  • ssh remote login client

  • sshd remote login server

  • scp

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