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Re: [LUG] Security and SSH

 
On Sat, 22 Jan 2011, Neil Winchurst wrote:


On 21/01/11 10:00, Philip Hudson wrote:

On 21 Jan, 2011, at 8:49 am, Neil Winchurst wrote:


I think that I would like to understand it all a bit better. I will be
asking for some help on setting it up therefore, thanks Phil.



Cool. The files we'll be dealing with are $HOME/.ssh/config and
(depending on distro) /etc/sshd_config or /etc/ssh/sshd_config. You need
to edit and save the latter with superuser privileges. If you go for
public keys, we'll also be appending keys to $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys
on the server.

The sshd_config file is liberally commented, but not everything in the
comments is straightforward to understand.

It should be OK to keep this on-list, so long as we don't include
passwords, passphrases and private (not public) keys -- we'll get to
those in a bit -- but anything you're not sure about, take it offline.

--
Phil Hudson PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63
http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz @UWascalWabbit


Hi Phil,
further research has suggested to me that what I really need is to set up SFTP or something similar. I use my website to store a few important (to me) files as a sort of backup. So I use FTP (via FireFTP on Firefox) to copy those files over when there is any change to them.
I think that it would be safer to use some sort of encryption when I copy those files and SFTP came up. 

Have I got that right?


I'm not Phil, but ...

Something to think about:
Do you want to encrypt the data in-transit, so that anyone snooping the wires will have a hard time decoding the data, or do you want to store them encrypted at the far-end so anyone hacking the server won't be able to see them?
If the latter, then you'll encrypt them before you send, so it doesn't really matter then how you send them.
I'd also look into using rsync (which needs ssh or rsh) if you want to easilly copy a few (or lots) of files that change infrequently. (or frequently) It's easier to just type the rsync command (or put it in a script) and let it work out which files have changed than to remember to upload the files you've changed recently... 

Gordon

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