Seting up a secure OpenSSH / Putty Connection... Help :)
 

Hi again people...

Firstly id like to thank anyone who has previously helped me on my quest to set up a working Slackware Web Server... Its going pretty good so far and after about 15 or so reinstalls im getting somewhere!! LOL :D

Now I have installed OpenSSH from the default package Slackware 9 provided and also installed putty on my laptop to conect to it. Now I guess I was expecting to have to put in some kind of security keys into putty to conect to my linux box but for some reason it was very easy to connect. I just stuck in the local IP of the linux server, selected SSH and it connected. The only warning being it said 'The server's host key is not cached in the registry... blah blah blah'

Now im not to worried about security at the moment as its all just on my LAN, but im going to be hooking it up live on the net soon so would like it secure.

I just wondered if I had to do anything else to tighten up security on the OpenSSH server?? Or is this all normal??

- Carl S

You might want to set it to not allow root logins. Maybe change the port number that it listens on. Not allow X forwarding. If this machine has two NIC and you only want to connect from your local LAN, then set it to listen only on that address. Also install the latest version. There is a current directory on the slack download site. Get the package from there and install. Or un-install the package and download the lastest source and install it. Other than that it should be as safe as can be expected. Remember if someone wants in bad enough they will get in.

Also you could run Apache in a chroot jail.

um i would update your openssh to 3.7.1p1