How to Secure a Local to Remote Connection

Hey folks, Olly Connely here at guvnr.com if you want to drop me an email. Today I’m going to show you how to encrypt data with open SSHN auto log-in with profit. To put it in plain English—to create a secure connection between your local windows box and your remote Linux machine, and to simplify the log in process to a double click transaction. These are part five of 20 parts series setup and unmanage VPS the New Biz VPS Bible. You can check that log by going to my blog and type in VPS and you’ll find a whole bunch of different pieces there. So anyway without further ado, what we’re going to do first of all is to I have to say encrypt our data with open SSH. So we need to create a couple of authentication keys. And the way we do that if you remember in part two if this series we setup a called PuTTY, which came at a bunch of different modules. And one of these modules is called PuTTYgen and so you want to open that up and we can create our keys in there. So we’re going to generate a public/private key pair by just clicking on Generate. Then, here is your key and you want to copy all of that down to this point. Here you want omit the very last—little bit that says RSA key with today’s date whatever that is. You want to copy the rest of it just going to paste that into a notepad for now and then go back to the key generator and you need to put in a pass phrase and then confirm. So we then again save a private key doing that save the generated the key. And I’m going to open up an instance of a PuTTY. I’m going to put in the IP address that we found in earlier tutorial and I’m going to open that up. Then I’m going to login with the Username that I created in the last part of this tutorial, “Guvnr”. And with the password that I created at that time so you must do it likewise. That brings me into my command line interface so I can actually use it. What I need to do is to make a directory in here. If you're not following all these don’t worry because you can actually copy the code. Copy and paste the code at my website. Now I’m going to open up a text editor called nano and I’m going to create a new file within this folder that I just created at the directory and I printed that. Now I’m going to create a file within it. Within this file I’m going to place one of those two keys that we just created. I’m going to open that up and I’m going to go back to that notepad where I pasted this. And I’m going to take that, copy it and paste it in there. One thing to bear in mind when do this is you don’t want any spaces here because it won’t work. So what I’m going to do is I'm just going to bring that on the same line with the single space between the RSA and the beginning of code proper. And then I’m going to go Ctrl X. To save it go Y for Yes and that’s done. Now what we are going to do is take ownership of that file. What we do is to type something CH Mod 600 and just hit return and that will give you ownership over that folder which means that now when we test it, what we’re going to do is to open up PuTTY again and we’re not going close that existing you want to keep that open here for now. What you need to do is get a connection of data. And in here you need to put in your Username. Then you’re going to go into connection access SSH, and here where it says private key file, you need to browse to that file. Then we want to go back to the main window session and just put in our IP address. It will give you a name I’m going to call it “guv Linode” and then save that. If I double-click on it what will happen is those two keys will then communicate with each other, the one that’s local and the one that’s remote and it’s asking me for that pass thing. We know those keys are communicating so we can get rid of the old CLI that’s now problem we can log-out the whole of it and what we’re going to is going to speed up this login process. Now that we’ve got a secured encrypted tunneled connection using our authentication keys we’re going to make it a lot easier to login with the double-click process. I’m going to minimize everything at the desktop. I’m going to open up a new Shortcut. What we’re going to do here is actually put in a location of not just one item but two items. One of them is going to be a new PuTTY module that we haven’t yet used called “PuTTY pageant” and the other item that we’re going to be adding into here is a private key. And so what I’ve done already is to work out exactly what the address is off those because we’re not simply doing what we normally do, which is browse and find it there because we need to put into that doesn’t work. And so what I’m going to have to do is to take that, copy it and put it there. Then do the same at the pageant. At the pageant you will find in the PuTTY folder wherever you install PuTTY in there is an execution for pageant.exe and so that’s one of them. And then the other one as I say is not private key that in my case I saved it on desktop in a folder there earlier and so I'm just going to copy those. I’m going to double-click on it. It’s going to ask for the pass phrase. I’m in. Now what happens is that you got this blog sort of to crap up here. You need to right click on that and get in a new session at the guv Linode. Then I just double click on that. It should be in, that’s it, as simple as that. So you don’t need a Username, you don’t need to input a password or anything like that. I can just do whatever I want to do I can check my RAM of something. That connects it and then I can go back to it just by again clicking on the character. Then double-clicking on whatever it is at guvnr Linode and that takes me straight in. My keys are communicating. So your data flow is encrypted, tunneled we’ve got really easy login process. In the next part in part six we’re going to type in the secure connection even more and we’re also going to add a firewall and then we’ll get on to the nitty-gritty of setting up this virtual private server. You can check all of that run a search on my site. You can grab a feed if you want to keep up-to-date by email or RSS.