Generate Certificates - Revision history

Cly at 00:33, 3 January 2010

2010-01-03T00:33:24Z

Aah10 at 10:59, 1 January 2010

2010-01-01T10:59:12Z

Aah10 at 13:29, 31 December 2009

2009-12-31T13:29:28Z

Aah10 at 13:24, 31 December 2009

2009-12-31T13:24:29Z

Aah10 at 13:14, 31 December 2009

2009-12-31T13:14:09Z

Cly: New page: TOC == Generate SSH Certificate == The instructions below are for Linux and Mac OSX. If you are not on Linux or OSX, you should SSH into either ''nsl.cs.sfu.ca'' or one of the cluste...

2009-08-19T04:21:13Z

New page: __TOC__ == Generate SSH Certificate == The instructions below are for Linux and Mac OSX. If you are not on Linux or OSX, you should SSH into either ''nsl.cs.sfu.ca'' or one of the cluste...

New page

__TOC__

== Generate SSH Certificate ==

The instructions below are for Linux and Mac OSX. If you are not on Linux or OSX, you should SSH into either ''nsl.cs.sfu.ca'' or one of the cluster machines in the lab.

The first step is to generate an private and public keys. Follow the instructions on the screen. When prompted for passphrase - leave it blank! Make note of the location of the keys.

<pre>
ssh-keygen -t rsa
</pre>

Once the keys are generated you will need to submit the public key (.pub) to your PlanetLab account (under My Account->Keys). The private key should be copied to the ~/.ssh/ folder if it's not already there.

== Configuring SSH ==

The next step is to relax SSH. Open/create the file ~/.ssh/config

Make sure you have these two lines in the config file.

<pre>
StrictHostKeyChecking no
BatchMode yes
</pre>

@@ Line 18: / Line 18: @@
 == Using ssh-agent ==
-Each time you will login using ''ssh'' or ''pssh'', you will be asked for your passphrase in order to decrypt the private key. If you want to enable a login session without entering the passphrase each time you should activate the ssh-agent. Public keys are not sensitive information and may be known to anybody, whereas the private key needs to be protected very carefully by a strong passphrase. Using multiple servers is easier designed by using ''ssh agent''. ssh-agent remembers the passphrase so that the user does not need to type it every time he or she wants to connect or send data to the server. Identities (i.e. private keys) are added to the authentication agent, ssh-agent, using the '''ssh-add''' command which takes as an argument the private key file to be added.
+Each time you will login using ''ssh'' or ''pssh'', you will be asked for your passphrase in order to decrypt the private key. If you want to enable a login session without entering the passphrase each time you should activate the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssh-agent ssh-agent]. Public keys are not sensitive information and may be known to anybody, whereas the private key needs to be protected very carefully by a strong passphrase. Using multiple servers is easier designed by using ''ssh agent''. ssh-agent remembers the passphrase so that the user does not need to type it every time he or she wants to connect or send data to the server. Identities (i.e. private keys) are added to the authentication agent, ssh-agent, using the '''ssh-add''' command which takes as an argument the private key file to be added.
 <pre>

@@ Line 18: / Line 18: @@
 == Using ssh-agent ==
-Each time you will login using ''ssh'' or ''pssh'', you will be asked for your passphrase in order to decrypt the private key. If you want to enable a login session without entering the passphrase each time you should activate the ssh-agent:
+Each time you will login using ''ssh'' or ''pssh'', you will be asked for your passphrase in order to decrypt the private key. If you want to enable a login session without entering the passphrase each time you should activate the ssh-agent. Public keys are not sensitive information and may be known to anybody, whereas the private key needs to be protected very carefully by a strong passphrase. Using multiple servers is easier designed by using ''ssh agent''. ssh-agent remembers the passphrase so that the user does not need to type it every time he or she wants to connect or send data to the server. Identities (i.e. private keys) are added to the authentication agent, ssh-agent, using the '''ssh-add''' command which takes as an argument the private key file to be added.
 <pre>
 eval `ssh-agent`
-ssh-add
+ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
 </pre>

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 == Generate SSH Certificate ==
-The instructions below are for Linux and Mac OSX. If you are not on Linux or OSX, you should SSH into either ''nsl.cs.sfu.ca'' or one of the cluster machines in the lab.
+The instructions below are for Linux and Mac OSX. If you are not on Linux or OSX, you should either check for appropriate instructions to perform this on you operating system, use a Linux emulation environment (e.g. Cygwin or MinGW), or SSH into either ''nsl.cs.sfu.ca'' or one of the cluster machines in the lab.
-The first step is to generate an private and public keys. Follow the instructions on the screen. When prompted for passphrase - leave it blank! Make note of the location of the keys.
+The first step is to generate both a private and public key. This is done using the '''ssh-keygen''' key generation command. Simply type the command followed by the type of key to generate as shown below and follow the instructions on the screen. For Planet-Lab, the RSA algorithm is used for the type of the key. Make note of the location of the keys.
 <pre>
@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 </pre>
-Once the keys are generated you will need to submit the public key (.pub) to your PlanetLab account (under My Account->Keys). The private key should be copied to the ~/.ssh/ folder if it's not already there.
+During the key generation process, you will be prompted for a ''passphrase''. This is because the generated private key will be encrypted and this passphrase will be used to decrypt the key later on whenever it is used. Although it is not recommended, when prompted for passphrase, you can just leave it blank! If you do enter a passphrase, you may need to use '''ssh-agent''' as will be shown in the following section.

@@ Line 35: / Line 35: @@
 StrictHostKeyChecking no
 BatchMode yes
 </pre>

@@ Line 30: / Line 30: @@
 == Configuring SSH ==
-The next step is to relax SSH. Open/create the file ~/.ssh/config
+The next step is to relax SSH. The first time you ssh into a certain machine, you are prompted whether you accept the machine's identification key or not. Since the experiments on PlanetLab usually utilize a large number of nodes, this would mean that the user would be prompted once for each node to be accessed. To get rid of this, open/create the file ~/.ssh/config and make sure you have these two lines in it.
 <pre>