ssh

This guide explains how to set up an SSH server on Debian Etch with public-key authorization (and optionally with disabled password logins). SSH is a great tool to control Linux-based computers remotely. It is safe and secure.

Are you using SSH in the best way possible? Have you configured it to be as limited and secure as possible? The goal of this document is to kick in the new year with some best practices for SSH: why you should use them, how to set them up, and how to verify that they are in place. All of the examples below assume that you are using EnGarde Secure Linux but any modern Linux distribution will do just fine since, as far as I know, everybody ships OpenSSH.

This document describes how to set up a chrooted SSH/SFTP environment on Fedora 7. The chrooted users will be jailed in a specific directory where they cannot break out. They will be able to access their jail via SSH and SFTP.

In this article I will show how to install and configure BlockHosts on a Debian Etch system. BlockHosts is a Python tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, it stops further login attempts from that IP address/host. By default, BlockHosts supports services that use TCP_WRAPPERS, such as SSH, i.e. services, that use /etc/hosts.allow or /etc/hosts.deny, but it can also block other services using iproute or iptables.

If you want to access a remote file system through ssh you need to install sshfs.sshfs is a filesystem client based on the SSH File Transfer Protocol. Since most SSH servers already support this protocol it is very easy to set up: i.e. on the server side there’s nothing to do. On the client side mounting the file system is as easy as logging into the server with ssh.

This tutorial describes two ways how to give users chrooted SSH access. With this setup, you can give your users shell access without having to fear that they can see your whole system. Your users will be jailed in a specific directory which they will not be able to break out of. The users will also be able to use SFTP in their chroot jails.

Fail2ban has been successfully used to protect SSH daemons, but this article talks about how you can use fail2ban to lessen the load of mailservers by blocking previously identified blacklisted IPs or relay access abuse. Howto is was written for Gentoo, but should easily be applied to any Linux distro.

It is possible to mount your remote filesystem as a local filesystem on your Red hat/CentOS Linux system using sshfs.

FUSE is a Linux kernel module also available for FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and Mac OS X that allows non-privileged users to create their own file systems without the need to write any kernel code.
SSHFS command utilizes FUSE to mount a file system using ssh.

This tutorial will describe installing FUSE, and using sshfs to mount your remote filesystem as a local mount point on your Linux system.

In this article I will show how to install and configure fail2ban on a Debian Etch system. Fail2ban is a tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, SMTP, Apache, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, fail2ban stops further login attempts from that IP address/host by blocking it with an iptables firewall rule.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a network-attached storage server with FreeNAS. FreeNAS is based on the FreeBSD operating system and supports CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC, SSH, local user authentication, and software RAID (0, 1, 5). It comes with a powerful web interface and uses very little space on the hard drive - about 32MB.