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Showing posts from April, 2017

The Keymaker: Simplifying Your Personal SSH Key Management

Image from here . Screen shot from film The Matrix Reloaded If you are like myself, and ssh into multiple remote machines, or even simply use Github over ssh this is for you. The Problem SSH has a lot of settings you can use, but when you're a relatively new developer you're not going to go mucking around in a config file you don't need to when there's work to be done! There are also security concerns with some settings, and issues if you have a lot of ssh keys. Also typing long username@domain strings can be annoying. The Solution The Keymaker   o——m , a small script (fewer than 250 lines) to help create ssh keys for remote machines. What does it do? First it helps you create a config file. If one exists already it will rename it with the suffix ".BACKUP". By default all ssh connections will show a randomart image ( VisualHostKey yes ) based on the public key provided by the host. This randomart image can be used to visually identify t