ssh notes

Below you’ll find my SSH tips and tricks. These are mostly as a note to myself, but you might find them interesting.

Generate SSH Key

I’ve started to use ED25519 SSH keys. Here’s how I generate them:

ssh-keygen -o -a 100 -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 -C "[email protected]"

If you need the key in PEM format, run the following:

ssh-keygen -m PEM -t ed25519 -f keyname -C [email protected]

SSH Config File

In my .ssh directory, I also have a file ~/.ssh/config which has a bunch of hosts declared in it. Those hosts each have their own configuration and then are assigned a short name. Below is an excerpt:

Host server01
  HostName server01.kilo.house
  Port 22
  User livearchivist
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_la_ed25519

This allows me to type ssh server01 instead of ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_la_ed25519 [email protected]. Once you start getting into more and more complicated SSH connections and configurations, you can see how this would save you a lot of time.

SSH Directory Permissions

I always end up looking up the proper ownership for .ssh directories, so rather than searching every time, here it is.

chown $USER:$USER ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown $USER:$USER ~/.ssh
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 644 ~/.ssh/*.pub
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys