SSH Tricks

SSH: More than secure shell

SSH is a protocol for authenticating and encrypting remote shell sessions.

But, using SSH for just remote shell sessions ignores 90% of what it can do.

# ssh home -L 80:reddit.com:80

This article covers less common SSH use cases, such as:

• using passwordless, key-based login;
• setting up local per-host configurations;
• exporting a local service through a firewall;
• accessing a remote service through a firewall;
• setting up a SOCKS proxy for Firefox;
• executing commands remotely from scripts;
• transfering files to/from remote machines;
• mounting a filesystem through SSH; and
• triggering admin scripts from a phone.

This post is part of my “Unix fundamentals” series. Recent posts in this series include settling into Unix, standalone lexers with lex, and sculpting text with regex, grep, sed and awk.

Update: By request, I added the SOCKS proxy option, but with a word of caution about DNS. (Firefox does not forward DNS requests by default.)