Practical SSH Encryption, Tunneling, and Automation

This year's LinuxFest was a bit more of a challenge for me. Having just had twins in January, and not seen a good night's sleep except on the eyes of my co-workers, finding time to whip up the presentation was tricky. I managed to get started at 11:30pm the night before. Somehow, it managed to turn out all right. At least folks seemed to be keeping awake through it... (Proof: See picture of my talk which I think is from Bri Lane's LFNW 2004 pictures.)

This year I wanted to do something different, such as doing a presentation that had less slides that minutes. I promised I'd do no more than 30, and if you don't count the front page or the URLs at the end I got in at 29. This led to less frenetic energy in the talk, and offered a lot more time for questions.

The talk discusses many of the weirder, hackish abilities of SSH. By now everyone uses SSH instead of Telnet, but most folks don't use the full power of it. Things like the SSH Agent to hold your keys, local and remote forwards, and proxyagents are just not something you play with until you read the man page -- not something you generally need with SSH - or have someone point it out to you. So the talk assumes you already use SSH, and jumps right into the fun. Why I put "Practical" in the title, I don't know. "Essoteric hackish SSH" would have been more accurate. But I use the things I show on a daily basis, so it's practical to me, at least.

Glad seeing you all up there, and many thanks to all the Fest organizers and BLUG specifically for making the Fest happen again this year.

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