TTT Part 33 of n – SSH ‘Bookmarks’

This entry is part 33 of 39 in the series Taming the Terminal

This is the final SSH instalment. So far we’ve learned how to securely execute terminal commands on remote computers, how to securely copy files across the network using SSH, how to add both security and convenience to both those operations with SSH key pairs, and how to tunnel just about anything through SSH. In this final instalment we’ll look two approaches for creating SSH bookmarks, SSH config files, and SSH GUIs.

Listen Along: Taming the Terminal Podcast Episode 33
http://media.blubrry.com/tamingtheterminal/archive.org/download/TTT33SSHBookmarks/TTT_33_SSH_Bookmarks.mp3

SSH Config Files

Each time you issue an SSH command, SSH checks for the presence of a system-wide config file at /etc/ssh/ssh_config, and a user-specific config file at ~/.ssh/config. If either or both of these files exist, they’ll be checked for a host definition matching the computer name specified in the command. If both files exist, and contain conflicting information, the user-level file takes precedence. If the contents of either file conflicts with flags passed to the SSH command, the flags passed to the command will take precedence.

Config files can be used to set things like the port number, username, and even the hostname/ip address for a given computer name.

The syntax for SSH config files is very simple. A file contains one or more host sections, and host sections contain one or more options. You start a new host section by starting a line with the word Host followed by a space and the computer name you want the section to apply to. You add the options for that host on the lines below, one option per line. For readability, the options for each host are usually indented with 2 or 4 spaces, or a tab. You can add comment lines by starting them with the # symbol. Option lines can be added in three forms:

Option_name Option_value

or

Option_name "Option value"

or

Option_name=Option Value

The first form can only be used if there are no spaces in the value for the options.

You can get a full list of all the supported options and values with the command:

man ssh_config

Here is a short-list of some of the more commonly used options:

User

Specify the username to use when connecting to the host.

Port

Specify the port to use when connecting to the host. This option is equivalent to the -p command line option.

HostName

Specify the real hostname or IP to use when connecting to the computer name.

ForwardX11

Specify whether or not X11 forwarding should be enabled. This option can only accept the values yes, and no. Setting the value of this option to yes is equivalent to including the -X command line flag.

ForwardX11Trusted

This option can only accept the values yes, and no. Setting the value of this option to yes is equivalent to including the -Y command line flag.

LocalForward

Specify a local port to forward to a remote port when connecting to the host. This option takes two arguments (separated by a space), the local port number to forward, and the destination host and port number in the form host:port. This option is equivalent to the -L command line option.

DynamicForward

Set up dynamic port forwarding (a SOCKS Proxy). The value must be a port number, and this option is equivalent to -D command line option.

SSH config files are very often used to specify that all SSH-based connections to a given computer should go to a given non-standard port. When using the SSH command itself you can specify the port number with the -p option, but you can’t always do that when using SSH via another command. For example, rsync does not allow you to specify an SSH port number, so if you need to use rsync to connect to a computer with SSH running on a non-standard port, you must use an SSH config file. E.g. if the computer my-rsync-server.com has SSH listening on port 2222, you would use the following host declaration in an SSH config file to enable rsync connections over SSH:

Host my-rsync-server.com
Port 2222

Even if you never find yourself in a situation where you must use an SSH config file, you might still find it worth the effort to set one up. You can use them to create what are effectively SSH bookmarks.

As an exmaple, let’s say we regularly have to connect to the server this-is-a-really-long-name.com on port 2222 with the username rhododendron. You could type the following each time you wanted to connect:

ssh rhododendron@this-is-a-really-long-name.com -p 2222

Or, you could shorten that command to:

ssh myserver

All you would have to do to make your life that much easier would be to create the following host definition in your SSH config file:

Host myserver
HostName this-is-a-really-long-name.com
User rhododendron
Port 2222

Notice how the HostName option allows us to give short nicknames to servers.

Finally, you can use wild cards when specifying a Host declaration. * is interpreted at as ‘zero or more of any character’, and ? is interpreted as ‘exactly 1 character’.

This can be very useful if, for example, you have the same username on all servers for a given company (perhaps the one you work for). You could set SSH to use that username on all servers in the organisations domain with an entry like:

Host *.my-company.com
User my_username

SSH GUIs

What ever OS you happen to be using, you’ll have many SSH GUI clients to choose from. In general they all provide the same basic functionality – they allow you to save SSH connection details so you can quickly and easily connect to the computers you regularly connect to. In effect, most of the GUIs are just graphical alternatives to SSH config files.

Rather than spend an eternity making an exhaustive list of all the SSH GUIs out there, I thought I’d simply recommend the ones I have found the most useful. Below are the three SSH GUIs I use reguarlly.

JellyfiSSH (OS X Only)

This little OS X app is available in the OS X App Store for just €3.49. It provides a small window containing your SSH bookmarks, and optionally a menubar dropdown with all your bookmarks. You use the app to open your saved SSH connections in new Terminal windows.

You can organise your bookmarks into categories, and you can set all sorts of settings for each bookmark. The app supports all the obvious stuff like host name, username, and port number, but you can also set up the more advanced stuff like X11 forwarding and port forwarding, and you can customise the Terminal settings for each bookmark. This means that you can do clever things like create a custom background image for each bookmark, or, set the background colour depending on the server’s role. I like to use red backgrounds for live servers for example, and green backgrounds for test servers.

The more energy you put into creating your bookmarks, the more use you’ll get out of the app. I find it well worth taking the time to create custom background images for each server so I can see at a glance what terminal window is connected to what server. My background images have the name of the server in big writing in the centre of the background image at 25% opacity and an icon for the OS the server is running in the top right corner.

Prompt 2 (iOS Only)

IMO the best SSH client for iOS is without doubt Prompt 2 from Panic. It’s a universal app, and costs just €4.99 in the iOS App Store.

The standard iOS keyboard is not very SSH-friedly, but with Prompt 2 that’s not a problem – the app’s UI provides quick and easy access to things like the control and tab keys, as well as special characters you’ll need often like |.

PuTTY (Windows)

I prefer to avoid using Windows desktops when possible, but when I have no choice but to use them, I use PuTTY for all my SSH needs. The app is as old as the hills, and has a website straight from the 1980s, but it works like a charm and is very popular. The app is small, efficient, and easy to use, and it’s also free and open source. PuTTY is a single stand-alone .exe file, so you don’t even have to install it, and you can run it straight from a thumb drive.

As well as just putty.exe, the SSH GUI, the same project also provides SCP (pscp.exe), SFTP (psftp.exe), and SSH Agent (pagent.exe) commands for Windows.

You can get all these Windows utilites from the PuTTY download page.

There are also versions of PuTTY for Unix and Linux.

Conclusions

With SSH keys for secure password-less authentication, and either SSH config files or an SSH GUI app to bookmark the computers you connect to regularly, you should be able to have a nice easy SSH experience. You can now easily execute remote commands, and transfer files across the network securely.

Within the context of the larger networking section within this series, SSH is just one of the Application Layer protocols we’ll be looking at. In the next instalment we’ll move on to look at terminal commands for interacting with HTTP(S), the protocol that powers the world wide web.