Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's the venerable ssh(1)/sshd(8)

While I grew up in an age where telnet(1) was my only option, the ssh folks made it a pretty drop-in replacement for the sorts of things I did with telnet, so switching was easy.

With the exception of when I'm rebooting or our ISP is having issues, I almost always have at least one SSH connection open and likely more than one connection to other hosts. Even in the "security" of our LAN in the house, I still SSH between machines rather than use unencrypted connections for transfer.

I love being able to run things remotely and use them locally, such as

$ ssh me@remote dmesg | xsel -ib

to put the remote machine's dmesg output on my system clipboard or

$ tar czvf - /path/to/data | ssh me@remote 'cd /destination/path ; tar xzf -'

to transfer a directory tree to a remote machine.

It generally has sensible defaults, allows me to force key-based authentication rather than username+password auth.

It allows me to limit $DAYJOB customers to SFTP-only access within their designated chroot directories, insulating them from each other.

I use it to tunnel into work and forward my RDP VM's screen so I can access it locally with rdesktop(1)

So many delightful little uses.

Definitely worth reading @mwlMichael Lucas 's SSH book to learn more: https://mwl.io/archives/3126