This week I have been playing a lot with SSH. The two comptuters are quite away from each other (500 km at least). Also I am most of the time away from them at job. I used to carry arround an USB Memory Stick, with some valuable files I need. But the two computers are connected into the net with ADSL, and therefore I could reach them easily.
And the access of choice is SSH. For many reasons. 1) It is suposedly to be secure (Secure is its name). And being involved the OpenBSD guys, double secure. 2) It is encrypted: safe for use in wireless networks and private from work. 3) Only uses one TCP port (22). Just one port to open in the firewall, just one port to configure the router. 4) The tool supports forwarding other ports, so it can be used as a tunnel for many other protocols and interfaces (from VCN to printing). 5) Includes a neat file transfer protocol (SFTP), so it is not only possible to access to the remote computer but to get and receive files. 6) It is an open protocol, with many implementations and all kinds of tools to access to it.
So now my two computers are accessible by SSH. From both Linux and OS X I use the ported OpenSSH tools (SSH & SFTP). From work I use PuTTY for SSH, and WinSCP for (despite of the name) SFTP. And my experiences are very positive. The main problems I had are: if the network access is slow, the interactive use is painful (but this is not a protocol's faul, but a network issue).
Well, and as a good example how risky could be connecting a computer to the net, as soon as I opened the SSH port, I got some remote compter trying different users and passwords trying to break in. Good thing that sshd by default blocks a machine after 10 failures. Lessons learned: 1) Try to use non easy to guess passwords 2) If possible, let's block what users can login from SSH 3) I will increase log verbosity to identify the IP of the atackers, I am curious about it.
