Connecting to your home computer from work, a friend’s house, or while on vacation in another country is very simple — if you know how to use a small handful of tools. Ken Hess shows you how to connect securely and tunnel traffic using SSH.
Connecting to your home computer from work, a friend’s house, or while on vacation in another country is very simple — if you know how to use a small handful of tools. Indeed, as a Linux user, you have a host (pun intended) of possibilities for remote access. Of course, you can access a character-based terminal screen, but you can also access a graphical desktop as a remote terminal or even via remote control.
However, connecting is not enough. You must also connect securely. In these days of hackers, crackers, phishers, sniffers, spammers, and terrorists, you must assume someone is always listening-in on your network conversations and looking for an opportunity to grab important information. This month’s “On the Desktop” demonstrates how to securely connect from a remote computer to your home Linux computer.
SSH and Related Protocols
One of the first remote access tools available on Unix was telnet. However, telnet is no longer widely used because its data is transmitted in plain text, including confidential information such as your username and password.
The replacement for telnet (and ftp, rcp, and rsh) is ssh, or the Secure Shell, which transmits all data in an encrypted form. ssh provides a classic character-based terminal similar to a telnet session, but also provides for file transfer via scp and sftp, and arbitrary, encrypted client-server communication via tunneling.ssh, sftp, and scp use TCP port 22.
Here’s an example of accessing a remote system named curly via ssh:
$ ssh curly...
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