Basics of ssh and scp
Monday, March 10th, 2008
What is OpenSSH? According to the OpenSSH page: OpenSSH is a FREE version of the SSH connectivity tools that technical users of the Internet rely on. Users of telnet, rlogin, and ftp may not realize that their password is transmitted across the Internet unencrypted, but it is. OpenSSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. Additionally, OpenSSH provides secure tunneling capabilities and several authentication methods, and supports all SSH protocol versions. The OpenSSH suite replaces rlogin and telnet with the ssh program, rcp with scp, and ftp with sftp. Also included is sshd (the server side of the package), and the other utilities like ssh-add, ssh-agent, ssh-keysign, ssh-keyscan, ssh-keygen and sftp-server.
OpenSSH is developed by the OpenBSD Project. The software is developed in countries that permit cryptography export and is freely usable and re-usable by everyone under a BSD license.
General speaking it is the remote terminal connection of choice. In this entry we are only going to cover the very basics of ssh and scp. We will cover more advanced features and sftp in later entries.