Latest Updates: os x

  • Using SCP Aliases to Upload Files Quicker (OS X, BASH)

    15:32 on August 2, 2009 | 0 Comments Tweet This! | Digg This!
    Tags: , , os x,

    If like me, you have a particular path on a server you always upload files to, via SCP, then you’ll probably want a better way than typing the full path into the scp command everytime you upload a file!

    This command has been tested on OS X, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t work on a Linux or BSD machine running BASH, either.

    I personally have a “stuff” directory on a web server, where I put random files to share with people, but it’s path is pretty long on the remote web server, and I have to type it everytime I run the scp command – not quick or great!

    There’s a way around it, though, by using bash aliases.  By editing the ~/.bash_profile file (.bash_profile in your home directory), we can alias common scp commands.

    So, for example, if I have a file called screenshot.png and I want it to go to /var/www/stuff on a remote server called server.example.com, I would normally have to do:

    scp screenshot.png server.example.com:/var/www/stuff

    This can get boring quick, especially if you do it a lot during the day.  We can, however, alias this to a command called whatever we want (take care though not to use an alias of an already existing command/application!)  So, if I wanted just a command of “scpstuff” I could do that by editing the ~/.bash_profile file by adding:

    alias scpstuff="scp $1 server.example.com:/var/www/stuff"

    You will need to close the terminal and reopen it for the alias to take affect, after saving the file.

    What this will do is, take the first argument to “scpstuff” (represented by $1), and run the command with it in, so, to upload something to the /var/www/stuff directory on server.example.com, all I would need to do now is:

    scpstuff screenshot.png

    You will be prompted for your SSH password as normal (unless you use SSH keys) but it’s much quicker than typing the whole line out each time!

    Of course, you could set up lots of aliases, such as scpstuff, scpimage, scpscreenshot – anything you do a lot would be useful!

     

  • SSH Client: Saving Server Configuration (Alias, Port, Username)

    14:46 on August 2, 2009 | 0 Comments Tweet This! | Digg This!
    Tags: , , os x,

    There may be occasions where you want to connect to a host with a long host name, for example ssh servername.example.com – now it’s not massive, but it’s not as quick as ssh servername

    If you’ve been following droptips.com, you’ll have noticed my other post about setting the port number in the SSH config file (~/.ssh/config for individual users) – you can also use this config file to connect to shortened hostnames (aliases).

    So, if you want to be able to ssh into servername.example.com but just doing ssh servername, you would add the following to the ~/.ssh/config file:

    Host servername
  HostName servername.example.com

    Now that’s great if you login to your local machine with the same username as the remote server, but what if it isn’t?  You’d have to do ssh remoteusername@servername but we can also get around this by adding User username to the host section:

    Host servername
  HostName servername.example.com
  User remoteusername

    You can also tie this into having the port number as per my other post like so:

    Host servername
  HostName servername.example.com
  User remoteusername
  Port 1234

    Once you’ve done this, whatever you put on the Host line, will work by just doing the following with whatever options the configuration file says:

    ssh host

    Hopefully this will allow you to speed up connecting to servers you connect to a lot!

     

  • SSH Client: Automatically Connect to a Servers’ Non-Standard Port

    10:18 on August 2, 2009 | 0 Comments Tweet This! | Digg This!
    Tags: , , os x,

    If you run an SSH server, or many SSH servers, then you may have set the SSH daemon to run on a non-standard port. SSH normally listens on port 22, but with the large amount of script/bot attacks now on this port, attempting random logins, changing it to something different is a quick way to stop the majority of these automated attacks.  I’ve detailed this in another post here.

    Once you’ve done this, though, you probably get bored with having to specify the port every time you connect by typing ssh -p 1234 hostname or scp -P 1234 hostname (where 1234 is the port SSH is running on hostname) – I know I do!

    You can get around this problem, by using the ~/.ssh/config file (config in the .ssh directory in your home directory).

    You can add multiple hosts to this file, along with their port, so you can simply ssh hostname and it’ll connect  using whatever port is set in that file.

    The entry you need to add is:

    Host host.example.org
  Port 1234

    Where host.example.org is the hostname you SSH too (if you SSH to an IP address, then this will need to be set here) and Port 1234 is the port number SSH is running on hostname.

    Once this is done, you’ll be able to:

    ssh host.example.org

    … and it’ll know that you need to connect on the port set in the file.

    You can add multiple hosts to this file, if you access multiple SSH servers:

    Host host.example.org
  Port 1234
    Host host2.example.com
  Port 4567

    Give it a try – it’s certainly saved me some time!

    You may also want to checkout another post on droptips.com with further options for the ~/.ssh/config file:  http://droptips.com/ssh-client-saving-server-configuration-alias-port-username

     

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