Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Tim Chase (gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Dec-2025 09:53:58 JST Tim Chase

   • Michael W Lucas :flan_on_fire:

   Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's the venerable ssh(1)/sshd(8)

   While I grew up in an age where telnet(1) was my only option, the ssh folks made it a pretty drop-in replacement for the sorts of things I did with telnet, so switching was easy.

   With the exception of when I'm rebooting or our ISP is having issues, I almost always have at least one SSH connection open and likely more than one connection to other hosts. Even in the "security" of our LAN in the house, I still SSH between machines rather than use unencrypted connections for transfer.

   I love being able to run things remotely and use them locally, such as

   $ ssh me@remote dmesg | xsel -ib

   to put the remote machine's dmesg output on my system clipboard or

   $ tar czvf - /path/to/data | ssh me@remote 'cd /destination/path ; tar xzf -'

   to transfer a directory tree to a remote machine.

   It generally has sensible defaults, allows me to force key-based authentication rather than username+password auth.

   It allows me to limit $DAYJOB customers to SFTP-only access within their designated chroot directories, insulating them from each other.

   I use it to tunnel into work and forward my RDP VM's screen so I can access it locally with rdesktop(1)

   So many delightful little uses.

   Definitely worth reading @mwl's SSH book to learn more: https://mwl.io/archives/3126

   • Embed this notice
     Xenotar (xenotar@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Dec-2025 09:53:56 JST Xenotar

     in reply to

     • Michael W Lucas :flan_on_fire:

     @gumnos @mwl At my university, the Computer Center took a long time to accept SSH because, according to them, encryption imposed an overload on the VAX Cluster (and we were using it on 486DX...).

   • Embed this notice
     Xenotar (xenotar@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Dec-2025 12:01:48 JST Xenotar

     in reply to

     @gumnos The problem was on the VAX side; we were using SSH without issues on the 486DX running FreeBSD and wanted sshd installed on the VAX. The excuse for not installing it was that the encryption imposed an overhead on the various interactive sessions.

   • Embed this notice
     Tim Chase (gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Dec-2025 12:01:50 JST Tim Chase

     in reply to

     • Xenotar

     @xenotar

     Hah, my first computer (rather than my parents' computers I'd used up to that point) was a 486DX/100 that ran (at various junctures) DOS+Win31, Win95 (borrowed), OS/2 (borrowed), Slackware, and RedHat. Good hardware for its time in '95, but I can see how cryptography might burden such a machine 😆

   • Embed this notice
     Xenotar (xenotar@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 17-Dec-2025 23:37:21 JST Xenotar

     in reply to

     • Michael W Lucas :flan_on_fire:

     @mwl @gumnos
     When SSH first appeared, Ethernet networks didn't use switches, and anyone could use a sniffer to intercept traffic on their network segment. The VAX cluster offered Telnet access to university services, and capturing passwords and logins was a real risk, which is why we insisted on migrating to SSH. But today it seems foolish of us, and that it would only overload the VAX cluster, doesn't it?

   • Embed this notice
     Michael W Lucas :flan_on_fire: (mwl@io.mwl.io)'s status on Wednesday, 17-Dec-2025 23:37:22 JST Michael W Lucas :flan_on_fire:

     in reply to

     • Xenotar

     @xenotar @gumnos

     It was a real concern on VAX. Your SSH had enough overhead to affect development.

     http://miod.online.fr/software/openbsd/stories/propolice.html