This can be useful to bypass remote network issues or restrictive firewalls. With a tunnel active and traffic proxied through the tunnel, that traffic will appear to be coming from your remote server instead of your local machine. All of this rerouted traffic is securely encrypted as it travels between your local machine and the remote server thanks to SSH.

For some uses, there may be an easier way to securely route your traffic through a remote server (like your VPS or dedicated server).Īn SSH tunnel is another method of rerouting some or all traffic from one location (like your local computer) through another (your remote server). The issue is that setting up and configuring a VPN can be time consuming and complicated. If you have a VPS or dedicated server, you could even run a VPN service from your server.

At the end of the process you should be able to test your log in without being prompted for your remote host password.VPNs are powerful tools and can help keep your network traffic secure. Several will prompt you for passwords, either for your public key password, or for your password on the remote host.

ProcedureĬopy the following code blocks into a terminal window, one after the other. The gist of what we'll be doing is creating a private key, and then sending the associated public key to the remote host to establish trust between the local system and the remote system.

You can also change the protection level on this password in Keychain Access to require the keychain password every time it's used. Apple has a feature of the MacOS X Keychain that allows you to add this password to your keychain, basically making the unlocking of the private key transparent. Typically when you set up a private key it is best practice to set a password on the private key, which would result in a need to enter the private key password every time you want to login to a remote host. Setting up public key auth allows you to ssh and scp to remote hosts without using your password. Setting up SSH Key Auth on a Mac Overview

Ssh for mac os x