Yet another note on connecting between unix/linux boxen using ssh. Again, not Perl related.

Although there are a few Perl wrappers available (search CPAN for Net::SSH) the real challenge is to connect securely. Storing passwords in files, especially cleartext Perl files, is not regarded secure in any way!

The alternative is to setup (Open-)SSH for using host keys, better yet, using the ssh-agent utility.

IBM DeveloperWorks has some excellent articles on this matter. I don't want to repeat these here, so just links:

• Devworks: Open SSH Key Management - introduction ssh keys
• Devworks: Open SSH 'ssh-agent' and 'keychain' - advanced and really secure options
• Devworks: Open SSH Agent forwarding - more features and improvements

For Windows you can use Putty which provides many of the SSH features through commandline utilities.

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Cheers, Joe

Update: corrected link 2 and added link 3