ssh / cygwin / windows quick & dirty

This guide is for the people who only want to get this thing done where you only type

ssh remotehost

to ssh to your server at crazylongdomainname.com with the user u3321445longandunhandy on a windows pc with cygwin. ## Configure this domain shortcuts Edit the file ~/.ssh/config such that it contains

Host remotehost
    Hostname crazylongdomainname.com
    User u3321445longandunhandy

## openssh Install openssh using cygwin setup.exe. ## Create a Keypair Open mintty and type

ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -f yourcomputername-key

You can use a passphrase or not. You will be prompted for this password whenever you want to use your private key. First, this seems as unhandy as entering it everytime you connect to the remote host, but it will turn out to be much more handy. We end up with two files: yourcomputername-key: your **private** key, make sure no one gets it. yourcomputername-key.pub: your **public** key, make sure everyone gets it. ## Copy public key to server Copy your public key to the remote host. You can use e.g.

scp yourcomputername-key.pub remotehost:/home/u3321445longandunhandy/

Then ssh to the remote host and create a script called create-ssh-dir:

if [ ! -d .ssh ]; then mkdir .ssh ; chmod 700 .ssh ; fi 
mv $1 .ssh/ 
cd .ssh/ 
if [ ! -f authorized_keys ]; then touch authorized_keys ; chmod 600 authorized_keys ; fi 
cat $1 >> authorized_keys

Make it execuatble with chmod u+x create-ssh-dir and, well, execute it with ./create-ssh-dir yourcomputername-key.pub. If you get error messages involving \r you have probably issues with so called "windows line breaks": Since windows is so old school and compatible with typewriters, the default for a line-break is \n\r and not only \n, which confuses something inside of cygwin. So make sure to configure your text editor correctly. You can test if everything works by logging out of the remote host and calling

ssh -i yourcomputername-key remotehost

It should now log you into crazylongdomainname.com with the user u3321445longandunhandy (because of the .ssh/config-file) and not prompt you for a password (because of the keypair). ## Use ssh-agent To get rid of the -i /path/to/yourcomputername-key, we can use the ssh-agent. I use the following bat-file to start a local shell that has my private key added to it:

ssh-agent bash -c " ssh-add /cygdrive/d/path/to/yourcomputername-key && exec bash "

In this shell you should be able to do ssh remotehost.