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?? :-)