How to Securely Connect to Your Server With SSH

Secure Shell (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol that allows you to securely connect to a remote server over an unsecured network. SSH is widely used by system administrators, developers, and IT professionals to manage and troubleshoot remote servers. For our purposes, it will allow us to execute commands remotely.

Prerequisites #

Before we begin, you should have the following:

• A remote server to connect to.
• A user account on the remote server with SSH access.
• An SSH client on your local machine. Linux and macOS systems come with an SSH client pre-installed. Windows users can use an SSH client like PuTTY.

Step 1: Open your Terminal #

First, open your terminal on your local machine.

Step 2: Enter the SSH command #

To connect to a remote server using SSH, you will need to enter the following command:

ssh username@remote_host

Replace username with your username on the remote server and remote_host with the IP address or domain name of the remote server.

For example, if your username on the remote server is john and the IP address of the remote server is 192.168.0.1, the command would be:

ssh john@192.168.0.1

If you are connecting to a remote server for the first time, you will be prompted to verify the authenticity of the host by confirming its fingerprint. Type “yes” and press Enter.

The authenticity of host '192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:g5UzS2q3+mco0dC8GK0+WgJxoFdCY+RGWfP8kXuyjtl.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

Step 3: Enter your password #

Next, you will be prompted to enter your password. Enter the password for your user account on the remote server and press Enter.

john@192.168.0.1's password:

If the password is correct, you will be logged in to the remote server via SSH.

Step 4: Running commands #

Once you are logged in to the remote server, you can execute commands just as you would on your local machine. For example, to list the contents of the current directory, enter the following command:

ls

Step 5: Closing the SSH connection #

To close the SSH connection, simply type exit and press Enter.

exit

Conclusion #

In this tutorial, we learned how to connect to a remote server using SSH. SSH is a secure and powerful tool for managing remote servers. It allows you to remotely access and control your server from anywhere in the world. By following the steps in this tutorial, you should now be able to connect to a remote server using SSH and execute commands remotely.