Getting to grips with SSH – Part 2

By Ollie Armstrong Monday, 21st June 2010

Welcome to the second guide in the series, taking you through the basics of ssh, and some simple ssh commands to use.

Getting Started

First things first, you need to add your ssh key to your CatN vCluster settings. There's a great tutorial Adding your ssh key to your vCluster for achieving this on Mac OSX and Windows. Once your ssh key has been added to your vCluster you can connect using ssh.

Connecting To Your vCluster

To be able to connect to your CatN vCluster, you will need a few settings from your settings page. These can be found on the CatN control panel under the settings button.

Here you will find the host name, username and an example command to use to connect. Take a note of the host name and username, we will need those later.

Connecting in Mac OS X

Open up a Terminal window, which can be found in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal or by typing "Terminal" in spotlight, and type in the command:

ssh username@hostname

and then press enter. Your command should look something like this:

And you should get some feedback saying:

Just type yes and hit enter again. Congratulations, you are now connected to your CatN vCluster via ssh! Displayed now is a prompt similar to the local Terminal prompt, but different. It will have the username and host in square brackets followed by a dollar sign. Most regular Unix commands can be typed at this prompt, but they will be covered in later tutorials.

Connecting in Windows

There is already a guide to connecting using windows in the aforementioned link (here in case you missed it...) and that will cover how to create/add the key and connect.

Top tip: in the guide it will not save your settings when you exit. After you have entered the settings, if you type a name in the sessions box and click save, then you can load them in future to stop that extra hassle. Handy huh?