ok i have a laptop running RH9 and a desktop running Debian Sarge and a winXP pro box at the house.

my laptop is just something i use for moving around with and will often take with me and swap big files like TV shows and what not with friends.

when i come home i have to use winSCP to pull the files off my laptop and put them on XP so i can get access to them on my debian box (this is a media box that i play the TV shows on) i know there is a way to dirrectly connect to my laptop from my deiban box via SSH (i use putty all the time for basic stuff) and i have read that there is CLI for sFTP.

i dont get how it works.

i need some real basic steps on how to ssh from debian to laptop and start the sftp transfer via ssh from the laptop to the desktop.

by basic i mean type: exactly what to type

example:

to mount a windows share on a linux box type the following:

first make a new directory that you will mount the share into:
that level of detail. if you want to explain the why after the how, that would be nice too, but for now the how will be great.

Thank you for your time.

I suppose you have sshd running on the machine you want to connect to...if it's not, start it (I'm pretty sure you can do this, if you have it running on your other machine too, where you connect via putty as you said..)

test to see if it runs:
now if you got some process, it's on. now make sure your /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny don't have anything that might keep you out of your box (ie hosts.deny does _not_ deny your machine's from connecting, but hosts.allow enables them. if both files are empty, or hosts.deny is empty, then you're ok).

then go to the box you want to connect from. type

to connect - username is the username on the machine you want to connect to, that you use, and address is simply the ip-address (or if they're in ethernet, the machine name that is found in /etc/hosts I think) of the machine you connect to. to use sftp instead, run

so it works just the same - but instead of a normal command prompt, you get a line like this:

sftp>

where you type the sftp commands. like help for example...

and that's it. just make sure that:

1) on the host machine, sshd is running
2) on the host machine, /etc/hosts.allow and hosts.deny are configured ok
3) on the host machine, sshd's config is okay (try: locate sshd |grep conf)
4) on the host machine, no firewall is blocking you
5) on the client machine, you have ssh installed
6) on both machines the keypairs for ssh have been created (google for help if you haven't...but if you can use ssh, then they are)

well, my lessons continue now...so can't help any more atm I'll get back to this later, perhaps only after this weekend (sorry), but you should do with this help. use google if you can't figure something out (a command, for example)...