Day 3 - Remote Computing with the Secure Shell
Video
Motivation
Pretend that you are a graduate student at Purdue University. Something has happened that makes accessing the computers you used to take for granted - in your office, or classroom - significantly more difficult.
Unfortunately, you left some files you want on those servers, and you also want to put some files onto those computers. But you don't want to leave your home.
Enter ssh. It, and its cousin scp, are going to save your day.
Servers
To use ssh, must have a client and a server. Fortunately, you should already have an ssh client - and the university has set up servers.
For people in the math department, you can access your department account at a variety of servers. The two general purpose servers are:
banach.math.purdue.edu
hardy.math.purdue.edu
For all students at Purdue university, the server for your files (on the classroom and computer lab computers) is:
maven.itap.purdue.edu
For staff, your local files are at:
guru.itap.purdue.edu
Note that maven and guru are only available from within the Purdue network, so you may have to use an itermediate server or log in to the Purdue VPN.
Client
We have installed ssh as a client as part of git bash. In fact, we will use it to connect to git servers later in the course.
For now, though, all you need to know is that the ssh family of commands - in our case, ssh, scp, ssh-keygen, and ssh-copy-id - must be run from your bash session.
Connecting
To connect to a server using ssh, it is a simple as:
ssh {your username}@{server address}
For example,
ssh bradfor3@banach.math.purdue.edu
is how I might log in to the department server. There, you will have a bash session - a bit different than our local bash, but you can use all the things we have learned to navigate.
To practice this yourself, continue on to this week's worksheet.