My personal blog

I was asked recently how I manage my ssh connections to various servers.

I'm copying my reply here:

First of all, I'm using a private/public key pair for all servers, no passwords anywhere. Ideally, my servers don't even allow logins with passwords.

I keep my ssh private keys encrypted. If you already have unencrypted keys, you can encrypt them with ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -p.
I use a password manager to store the passphrase, so I only decrypt them once or they are automatically decrypted when I login to my computer. There's gnome-keyring for Gnome users and kwallet for KDE fans.

I use ~/.ssh/config to save the ssh preferences for each server. eg:

Host my-server
    HostName my-server.net
    User itsme
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
    Port 22

I just type ssh my-server or rsync -av <path> my-server:<path>.
Sometimes I use a shell (bash/fish) alias like alias @my-server="ssh my-server".
I've also used rofi. It's an application launcher that supports ssh connections based on ~/.ssh/config.

A witty quote goes here...