Hardening the secure shell environment
In this recipe we will learn how to provide additional security measures in order to harden the secure shell environment.
The secure shell (SSH) is the basic toolkit that provides remote access to your server. The actual distance to the remote machine is negligible, but the shell environment enables you to perform maintenance, upgrades, install packages, transfer files, or facilitate whatever action you need to carry out as the administrator in a secure environment. It is an important tool, and as the gateway to your system, it is the purpose of this recipe to show you how to perform a few rudimentary configuration changes that will serve to deny root access, add a welcome banner, and protect your server from unwanted guests.
Getting ready
To complete this recipe you will require a minimal installation of the CentOS 6 operating system with root privileges and a console-based text editor of your choice. It is assumed that your server already maintains at...
