Introduction OpenBSD has recently stressed to us the value of key rotation by their use of “Signify” distribution release signatures.

A script a day will allow you some freedom to play and build other useful and more complicated scripts. Every day, I attempt to make my life easier—by this I mean, trying to stop doing the repetitive tasks. If a process is repeatable; it can be scripted and automated. The idea to automate everything is not new, but try automating a command on a remote host. SSH is very flexible, and it comes with many options. My absolute favorite is its ability to let you run a command on a remote server by passing the -t flag. An example:

I was chatting with Fred Richards on IRC the other day (flrichar on freenode) about sneaking around hotel firewalls. Occasionally, hotels will block things like the SSH port, hoping people don't abuse their network. Although I can respect their rationale, blocking an SSH port for a Linux user is like taking a mouse away from a Windows user!

I love SSH. I mean, I really, really love SSH. It's by far the most versatile, useful, amazingly powerful tool in my system administration quiver. One of the problems with SSH, however, is that when it dies, it doesn't automatically recover. Don't get me wrong.

If you need remote access to a machine, you'll probably use SSH, and for a good reason. The secure shell protocol uses modern cryptography methods to provide privacy and confidentiality, even over an unsecured, unsafe network, such as the Internet.

No, there's SSH in my browser! Although it may not be as logical of a combination as chocolate and peanut butter, for Chromebook users, an HTML5 SSH client is pretty amazing. Granted, Google's "crosh" shell has SSH abilities, but it's a very limited implementation.

Do you routinely make changes to more than a dozen machines at a time? Read this article to find out about a tool to make that task much easier.