Do I need SSHd?
 

Hi,

I've been messing around (hey, Sunday morning, not shaved, still in wrinkles of last night, mug of steaming hot Java - eh you get the picture) with the firewall and found ssh at port 22 to be among the trusted services. These is an SSHD listening to port 22 as well...

Do I need this? I read that ssh is needed to log on remotely. I don't want THAT to happen (eek) to me! If I uncheck this, will I be able to log back in from console 0 - the keyboard.

Tnx for some Sunday morning buzz...

Thor

You can safely stop sshd if you don't want to access your machine remotely.

Hi,

Big tnx! It felt like a (huge) security hole...so, why not plug it? I don't need to access or have accessed my machine remotely at all...

So, click, turned off and tnx!

Thor

Maybe you installed it "by accident", some (many) distributions don't install such services unless you specifically want to, because of what you said (it's a potential hole and totally unnecessary if you don't use it). A "full install" or "install everything" option might pull that in of course, and if you've done something like that, check the other services you might be running to see if there are others you don't need (httpd/apache, mail server, ...)

The client (openssh-client) is all you need if you connect to remote servers yourself; server (openssh-server) is needed if you (or somebody else) need(s) to connect to your machine remotely. On some distributions there may be a metapackage (for example called just "ssh") that pulls in both the client and server, so that's a third way to accidentally get it.

I wouldn't really call it a "security hole" as such the protocol is generally pretty secure. Yes, it does give an attack point to the outside world but if your passwords (and/or ssh key passphrases) are secure enough then you should be fine. But like you said, if you have no need for it, there's no point it running! :)