Introduction

The administration of a server only makes sense via SSH and could also be activated directly during installation. If this was not done, we will briefly explain here how to do it. Even a newly created jail does not have SSH activated by default and requires the same steps.

Prerequisites

• User for administrative purposes has been created

SSH is part of the base system and is activated with service sshd enable and started with service sshd start. That's it :)

Ok, bonus content:

Access via SSH key

Logging into a system with a password can be very tedious in the same network and can be simplified considerably by storing a ‘key’ at the destination. The following steps are necessary for this:

• On the visitor's system:
  • ssh-keygen generates a so-called key pair. A private key (id_rsa) and a public key (id_rsa.pub). The private part must be kept confidential and is as valuable as a password. To be on the safe side, this can also be protected with a password. This can also be done subsequently with ssh-keygen -p -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa. The two files are saved in /home/USERNAME/.ssh/
  • The public part of the key is now copied to the target system with ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub USERNAME@HOSTNAME and automatically marked as ‘authorised’.
  • A connection is then established with ssh USERNAME@HOSTNAME without a new password request (or only that of the private key. Your decision)

Voilá