Stuff about SSH

Let your Computers trust each other:

The main benefit of the following procedure is that you don't have to enter passwords when establishing a secures shell connection:

1. Generate a rsa key on yout your local machine (the computer which wants to connect to a remote "server" without entering a password)
ssh-keygen -t rsa
Press [ENTER] three times to save the key at the default location(homedir/.ssh/id_rsa) without password.

2. Copy the newly generated public key from homedir/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to homedir/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server. If this file does not exist create it. Otherwise add the keysting to the file.

3. Now you can connect to the server with ssh -l username ip-address without entering a password.

X-Forwarding:

You can forward the graphical output of any X-application for a server to a client.
To do so your client pc must have a X-Server installed. The X-application must be installed on your server. This may wrong or illogical to oyu, but it is not :-)

The Application which "runs" X-applicaitons is calles X-server and a X-application is called a X-client. Just think about it a few times and it will become clear.

So, to forward the gui of a X-application via ssh you just have to follow a few steps:

1. Set ForwardX11 to yes in /etc/ssh/ssh_config and /etc/ssh/sshd_config on both computers to be able to forward in both directions.

2. Connect the computer with the X-application on it via

ssh -XYC -l username ip-address

and then start your application, e.g. xmms

ssh parameters:
X	Enables X11 forwarding
Y	Enables trusted X11 forwarding
C	Request Compression

Mounting remote directories via sshfs:

sshfs is a amazing tool wich allows you to mount any directory on any server you can reach via ssh fully transparent into your filesystem.

Unlike e.g. fish:// oder sftp:// in konqueror, which is just a wrapper for scp, a directory mounted with sshfs behaves just lie a ordinary directory.You can even playback video or view pictures without downloading them first.

With realtively good speeds and the security of ssh it has completely replaced nfs or samba for me.

To use sshfs you need to load the fuse kernelmodule:

modprobe fuse

Mount a directory:

sshfs -p PORTNUM USER@HOST:/path/to/folder /mnt/mountpoint

A sshfs entry in fstab:

sshfs#USER@HOST:/path/to/folder /mnt/mountpoint fuse  user,noauto,port=PORTNUM 0 0