Wiki > SSH
Whatbox provides a shell account for each user on their server. A shell account is a user account with a command line interface that can be accessed over SSH. Controlling clients, manipulating files, transcoding music, creating torrents, and tunneling traffic are just some things that shell access lets you do.
Connecting
Linux or Mac OS X
- Open a terminal
- Enter
ssh user@server.whatbox.ca
- Enter your password when prompted
Windows
Since Windows does not come with an SSH client, you will need to download and install KiTTY. Alternatively, you can follow the Linux and Mac directions in a cmd.exe window.
- Start KiTTY and enter
server.whatbox.ca
in the Host Name field. - Make sure SSH is selected as the connection type
- In the menu on the left, go to Connection->Data.
- Enter your Whatbox username
user
(use all lowercase letters) and slot password in the Auto-login username and Auto-login password fields. - Return to Session from the menu on the left.
- Under Saved Sessions enter
Server
and click Save - Double-click the name in the list. If all went correctly you should now see
user@server ~ $
Other
SecureCRT is a shareware terminal emulator available for all major operating systems and can be used instead of or in addition to the methods above.
Public key authentication
If you already have a personal RSA, ECDSA, or Ed25519 key pair and wish to use public key authentication to login to your server.
- Create a .ssh folder in your home if it doesn't already exist.
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
over SSH. - Upload your public key file (usually ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub or ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub to the ~/.ssh folder, renaming it authorized_keys. If you would edit ~/.ssh/authorized_keys instead, make sure that the key takes up a single line and doesn't get line wrapped.
- Set file permissions to 0600.
chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
over SSH.
After Connecting
The following articles are related to things that you can do over SSH: