Last week’s Tip of the Trade looked at how to stop your SSH session from dropping out, using
the .ssh/config file. This file can also set many other settings, either globally or on a per-host basis. Note that SSH uses the first option it encounters, so per-host options should go before global options in the file.
Tip of the Trade: SSH can set a host of settings on either a global or per-host basis. Check out these especially useful ones.
SSH keys and ssh-add are useful to minimize password-typing. But
you don’t necessarily want to use the same key for all the machines you log
onto, which requires more typing, to -i keyfile on the command line.
Alternatively, you can set the identify file per host with a section like this
in your ~/.ssh/config file:
Similarly, the -X and -Y command-line options enable X11
forwarding and trusted X11 forwarding, respectively. If you always want to
forward X11 but only want trusted X11 for a particular machine, try this:
Host desktop.example.com ForwardX11Trusted yes Host * ForwardX11 yes |
You can also use the .ssh/config file to set hostname
abbreviations. This is useful if you regularly log into a particular machine
that has an inconveniently long name. Similarly, you can use the User
setting to specify the user to log in as. So:
Host longname.machine.example.com HostName lmach User julietkemp-longname |
will enable me to log in to that machine simply by typing ssh lmach
rather than ssh julietkemp-longname@longname.machine.example.com.
You could do something similar with a bash alias; however, scp will
also use settings from the .ssh/config file, so it’s a more
generalized solution.
