Saving SSH options for specific host
Who doesn’t know that problem. You are working on a bunch of different hosts via ssh, and on all of them you need specific SSH Options. On the first the port differs, on the second you need to login with a different user than you are connected right now, on the third you need X-Forwarding and on the fourth you want to redirect a remote port to a local one. I knew that it is possible to save host-specific options in a ssh config file, but I never got arround to take a look at it. Now I found exactly that question – and the answer – in the popular german computer magazine CT. The file is
~/.ssh/config
The structure is rather simple. You specify a connectionname via
Host CONNECTIONNAME
and the belonging host via
HostName HOSTNAME
After that you can specify any options you want to for the connection (see man ssh_config). You can do it for as many hosts as you want. I just set it up and it is just to cool how much time it saves not to type all the stuff all the time.
Example:
Host stiffmaster
HostName 192.168.6.112
User prego
Port 33
LocalForward 6312 localhost:631
ForwardX11 yes
Now you just type ssh stiffmaster instead of ssh -X -L 6312:localhost:631 -p 33 prego@192.168.6.112. Isn’t that cool?? 
September 12th, 2006 at 9:54
DUDE, do you know how long I’ve just created bash aliases?
stuff like:
alias bricker=’ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 user@bricker.fqdn.tld‘ ?
I even have an alias that has no less than 3 (maybe 4?) port forwards.
All I can say it, THANK YOU for this post. And THANK YOU for Larry the Cow, This is such a very awesome tip!
September 12th, 2006 at 10:03
September 14th, 2006 at 18:28
Stiffmaster….- Zu viel American Pie geschaut?
Ansonsten danke fuer den eintrag. Den kann ich gut brauchen.
Mai 17th, 2008 at 10:04
[...] einiger sehr langer Zeit habe ich mal ueber “Saving SSH options for specific host” geschrieben. Fuer mich ist die ~/.ssh/config nicht mehr wegzudenken. Bloed ist natuerlich, [...]