【My Study Note】Remote Connection and SSH
Remote Connection and SSH
What is Remote Connection?
Remote connection makes working in an IT support role much easier since it allows us to manage multiple machines from anywhere in the world.
What is SSH?
SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol implemented by other programs to securely access one computer from another.
To use SSH, you need to have an SSH client installed on the computer you’re connecting from along with an SSH server on the computer you’re trying to connect to.
On the remote machine, the SSH server is running as a background process. It constantly checks if a client is trying to connect to it, then will authenticate its requests.
Popular program to use SSH
| Linux | OpenSSH |
| Windows | PuTTY |
After connecting to the SSH Server
Now that you’re connected through SSH, any of the text commands that you type are sent securely to the SSH server. From here, you can even launch an application, they’ll let you see a GUI instead of working directly in the shell.
SSH keys
We can connect to SSH using passwords. This way of authenticating to remote machine is pretty standard, but it’s not super secure. The alternative is using an SSH authentication key.
SSH keys come in a set of two keys called private and public keys.
You can think of them as actual physical keys to a special safe. You can use one key to lock the safe, but it won’t unlock it. The other key can then only unlock the safe, but not lock it.
That’s basically how public and private keys work and this ensures that whatever is in the safe is available to only those with the public and private keys.
VPN (virtual private network)
Another way that you can connect securely to remote machine is through VPN.
It allows you to connect to a private network like your work network over the Internet. Think of it as a more sophisticated SSH with a lot more setup. It allows you to access resources like shared file servers and network devices as if you are connected to your work network.