Secure Shell (SSH) essentials - a hands-on guide

SSH is almost NEVER mentioned in the technical requirements of any IT job

If you read any Linux administrator/DevOps Engineer/Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) job posting anywhere, you'll NEVER find SSH as part of the candidate's technical requirements. Can you guess why? Exactly! because it's assumed to be in your skillset ALREADY!.

Today, there's no IT professional (regardless of the platform) who doesn't know how to use SSH. It'd be like hiring a call center representative who doesn't know how to talk!

But if the average IT professional knows a thing or two about SSH, a true Linux administrator must know how to use SSH to its max. That's a fact. And here's why:

SSH allows you to securely log in to your Linux/UNIX/macOS box without revealing your credentials and data over the network. The chances of your server getting hacked are extremely lower now.

SSH offers key-based authentication so you don't even need to memorize your password. Guess what? it's even more secure than password-based authentication. Now, you can forget about spending hours trying to come up with a strong, unique password for each of your servers!

Over SSH, you can upload or download files and directories securely. You no longer need to deploy HTTP or FTP services and waste your time configuring and securing them. Instead, you can spend that time learning your next skillset.

Need to run Firefox on your remote machine that's miles away? With X11 forwarding you can run any graphical program from your remote machine over the same secure SSH connection. Trust me, that'll dazzle your colleagues.

With "message of the day" (motd) you can use SSH to display a phrase to anyone who logs in over SSH (including you). How about "use your hand sanitizer every now and then"? or even "This is the production server. Please be careful with your commands". Make that extra mile and do your team members a valuable favor.

This course will teach you all the above. But there's more!

If you already know the basic skills of SSH, this course will take those skills to the next level. Read on to know more.

SSH and OpenSSH are not the same! learn the difference and where each of them is used. Impress your boss or your potential employer with your knowledge.

Ubuntu does not come with SSH preinstalled for security reasons. Learn how to install it in a few seconds. Your friend's got a new Ubuntu laptop and cannot find SSH? be there to help.

Windows is your platform of choice? no problem! This class will make you work with Windows SSH clients like PuTTY and MobaXterm like a true professional. You'll be amazed by what a tiny tool like PuTTY is really capable of. Need to upload or download a file and you hate using the command line? WinSCP is there for you.

Are you security paranoid? and who isn't today?! In this class, you will learn how to tighten your grip over your machine and network to achieve even better security:

Is your machine connected to multiple networks (the corporate network and the public Internet)? Limit SSH connections to the corporate network only and slam the door in the hackers' faces.

Want to limit SSH connections to system administrators only for that critical production server? SSH allows you to do that. Even if outside users have the correct credentials, they'll be denied login.

Wait! there's even more!

Once you have the basics and the advanced SSH skills, you're ready to move to the pro level. In this part, you will learn how to use SSH in the most untraditional ways. If you thought SSH was just for secure log-in to servers and some secure file transfer, this part will make change your mind.

Use a jump server (also called bastion server) as the only entry point for a bunch of SSH servers. This host is your entry point to the servers behind it. Save time by applying the maximum security practices to only one server. Gain even more security by exposing only one server to the public network. Enjoy the peace of mind you'll get after this step!

Your servers are behind the firewall, you forgot to open HTTPS for yourself. Now you're working from home and you need urgent access to that web application behind the firewall but you can't. But you do have SSH enabled on the firewall! using an SSH tunnel you can gain access to that web application without having to wake the on-call engineer up. Guess what? you're not compromising security either so you won't get blamed the next morning.

Now comes the favorite! you can turn any server to which you have SSH access to a proxy server (called SOCKS proxy). Do you want to access a website that requires the connection to be coming from a specific region? or do you want to test connections to a web service while simulating different clients from different countries? if you have an SSH server in that region (in the cloud, for example) you can set up an SSH SOCKS proxy on that server and use it from anywhere in the world! it's often cheaper than using a VPN.

Go ahead and watch the free preview lectures to get to know my teaching style.

Waste no more time and hit the Enroll button now!