Conclusion

OpenSSH is a very versatile tool, and we hope that the introduction you received in this chapter has motivated you to experiment and learn more. Just think of everything we’ve covered:

You’ve learned the basics of how public key cryptography works, which is essential to being able to reason about these kinds of tools and their usage. You saw how to create SSH keys and use them for remote shell sessions.

Hopefully, you got some practical experience, too, by following along and setting up key-based logins for a remote host that you work with often. If that remote host happens to be on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or another platform that uses .pem keys, you learned how to convert between key formats (that trick alone is sure to impress your coworkers).

Even if you didn’t run into them yourself, we exposed you to some of the most common SSH errors we see people get stuck on in the wild, and how to track them down with the –v option.

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