What you should know about SSH

Michael W. Lucas pub­lished his new book “SSH Mas­tery” (no link to an online store, get it from your pre­ferred online or offline one in your part of the world).

Do you think you know a lot about SSH? I thought I did when Michael searched tech­ni­cal proof-readers for this book. I offered to have a look at his work in progress and he gen­tly accept­ed (while I do not get mon­ey for this, I am one of the per­sons he thanks for  the tech­ni­cal review in the begin­ning, so I am involved some­how and as such you should take the fol­low­ing with a grain of salt).

I already had user restric­tions in place before the review, but now I nar­rowed down some restric­tions based upon some con­di­tion­als. I already used SSH tun­nels for var­i­ous things before (where legal­ly applic­a­ble), but I learned some addi­tion­al VPN tech­niques with SSH. I already used mul­ti­ple ssh-keys for var­i­ous things, but Michael pro­vides some inter­est­ing ways of han­dling a large-volume of ssh-keys over mul­ti­ple machines. … I real­ly hope that my review was as valu­able for Michael, as it was for me to do the review.

He ends the book with “You now know more about SSH, OpenSSH and Put­ty than the vast major­i­ty of IT pro­fes­sion­als! Con­grat­u­la­tions”, and this is true, and all that in his writ­ing style where you can come with a prob­lem, read about it, and leave with a solu­tion (nor­mal­ly with a lit­tle bit of enter­tain­ment in between).

I know a lot of peo­ple which work dai­ly with SSH, and they know only a small part of what is pre­sent­ed in this book. In my opin­ion this book is a must-have for every System/Database/Application/Whatever Admin­is­tra­tor in charge of some­thing on an UNIX-like sys­tem, and even “nor­mal users” of SSH (no mat­ter if they use PuT­TY, or a ssh com­mand line pro­gram on an UNIX-like sys­tem (most prob­a­bly it will be OpenSSH or a clone of it)) will get some help­ful infor­ma­tion from this book.

I can only rec­om­mend it.