Tag: ssh

Keep your SSH sessions alive

Most Internet service provider will try shutdown active Internet connections after a view minutes to prevent their network from streaming videos or other bandwidth killers. This happens often because of some router setting you can’t change. As a web developer your SSH session (and other active connections) will freeze, if you stop working in the terminal window for just 5 minutes or by getting a fresh cop of coffee.

To get rid of this problem you need to change your SSH config file, enter the following inside to the terminalwindow

sudo nano /etc/ssh/ssh_config

and add this setting to the end of the file

ServerAliveInterval 60

Safe your file and start a new SSH session which will stay active because the client sends every 60 seconds a bit of data to the server.
Check also this article for more information.

SSH Authentication without entering a password

Follow the instructions below to create and install a SSH public key on your remote server. After you followed these steps your able to login via SSH without entering a password. This is extremely useful for backups with rsync or for other automatic tasks you like to execute.

  1. Change to your user’s home directory (local system) 
    cd ~
  2. create a pair of private keys 
    ssh-keygen -f .ssh_key -t rsa -N ''
  3. *** upload the public key to the remote system using rsync via SSH 
    rsync -e ssh ~/.ssh_key.pub user@YourServer:key1.pub
  4. login to your server via SSH using the command line or Putty 
    ssh user@YourServer

    (you need to enter your password too)

  5. check if the .ssh directory exists, if not create it 
    mkdir .ssh
  6. add the public key to the user authorized key files 
    cat key1.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
  7. remove the uploaded key from your home directory (remote system) 
    rm key1.pub
  8. test your new “private” connection 
    rsync -avz -e "ssh -i .ssh_key" "someFolder" user@YourServer

Now you’re able to access the remote system (YourServer) from your local system without using a password. This tutorial is for Linux only.

*** UPDATE: 12th december 2011

If you can’t create a persistent SSH connection to you backup server this way you need a small workaround:

After the creation of your “local” keys you need to download the “authorized_keys” file from the backup server

rsync -e ssh user@YourServer:.ssh/authorized_keys ~/authorized_keys

(check the exact locations first)

Now add your public key to the downloaded file

cat .ssh_key.pub >> authorized_keys

Upload the modified “authorized_keys” file to the backup server

rsync -e ssh ~/authorized_keys user@YourServer:.ssh/authorized_keys

Remove the downloaded file and test you connection like described in step 8.