DevOps Articles

SSH Made Easy with SSH Agent and SSH Config

Chances are pretty good you use Secure Shell to log into remote servers. SSH is well-known for being a (mostly) secure protocol that not only makes remote administration/development simple, it’s also one of your best tools for interacting with your cloud-hosted virtual machines.

The ssh-agent tool, in conjunction with SSH key authentication, makes it possible for you to start a session and, as long as you are within that session, you can log in and out of a remote server without having to type an SSH password or authentication passphrase.

Now, when you attempt to SSH into the remote server, it will ask you for your SSH keyphrase instead of your user password.

Let’s call those servers: And with each of those connections you log in with a different user name, so: What if, instead of having to type out the entire SSH command — as in ssh olivia@SERVER – where SERVER is the IP address of your AWS-hosted virtual server — you could simply type: ssh AWS