Secure Remote Connections – Tech Support

If you are going to be providing technical support, to be professional you should implemented a secure ssh connection. There is no excuse to potentially give terminal access to a password snooper. Using ssh the terminal commands themselves are encrypted, so disabling password login truly minimized risks of a security breach. Using a RSA key passwords are not transmitted and the login process is truly encrypted. Disabled password login by changing its option to “no” in the sshd configuration file. The config file is located in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. The default authorized key file is located in the users home directory. ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2. You need to place the id_rsa.pub information in the authorized_keys2 file. You can open the file manually or your can cat it in. You can also replace the entire authorized_keys2 file with id_rsa.pub; but maybe you want multiple authorized keys so use cat or editing manually may be better.

Create a new RSA key with:

ssh-keygen

It will put the new id_rsa and id_rsa.pub in ~/.ssh. When logging in as a client the default location for the id_rsa is in ~/.ssh, but you can place it anywhere using the ssh -i option. Then include the path to the id_rsa key. An example is:

ssh -i /home/user/Desktop/id_rsa user@host

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