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School of Mathematics

Obtaining and Using Secure Shell (SSH)

Computer Systems Guide
Printing, E-Mail

Ssh is used for encrypted point to point terminals and data copying across the internet. Ssh can be used for getting command line terminals to remote computers (similar to telnet) or to securely copy data using the scp command. Ssh is more secure than it's telnet and ftp predecessors.

If you wanted a terminal on the remote computer shell.example.edu and your username was johndoe, you could open a terminal on your local computer and run the command: "ssh johndoe@shell.example.edu".

If the unix command line is new to you, pick up a book on Unix from a local library.

SSH Software

Various free (or free for noncommercial use) ssh clients are available for different operating systems:

Unix

OpenSSH, DropBear SSH or Lsh. The OpenSSH page also has pointers to clients for various other platforms, and may be more current than this page.

Graphical and text user interfaces are available for ssh with the gftp and midnight commander software.

Windows

PuTTY which includes a (command-line) scp client.

There's a nice Windows scp client which is described at WinSCP. You should use this instead of ftp, and it will work to connect to most unix machines.

If you would like to run X applications on your local windows desktop from a Unix machine using Putty and XWin32 please read this page.

Macs OS 9

Try MacSSH which supports version 2 of the SSH protocol. If you need SSHv1 suport, try NiftySsh.

Macs OS X

You can use Fugu, or MacFusion to transfer files using a graphical interface. MacFusion integrates with the OS X finder and will freeze the desktop finder on 10.4 or earlier, so run MacFusion on 10.5 or higher.

If you don't want to install software, or prefer using a command line, use the program /Applications/Utilities/Terminal to use the unix commmand line ssh and scp commands.

Public Host Keys

It is wise, although not strictly necessary, to pre-install public host keys. If you'd like to do so, or if you'd like to check if a machine's key has really changed, the public host keys for the various math systems are collected here:

For OpenSSH ssh2 clients: ssh_known_hosts2.
The University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute maintains a ssh information page with links to many different client implementaions of ssh.

Institute of Technology
www.math.umn.edu/systems_guide/ssh.html
Last Modified March 24, 2008
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