[Courses] [Security] Ssh-agent (was: Terri's Laptop netstat)

[Terri Oda]

>         The downside to this is that every time you reboot the computer
>(or log out of X, if you used ssh-agent in the above way) someone will
>have to manually enter in the key passphrases that you want ssh-agent to
>be able to access.  But considering how often most Unix servers get
>rebooted (and how rarely many users log out of X), this isn't a huge
>problem for most people.  Still a time-saver.

Not super-useful for a laptop user who packs up her machine a minimum of 
twice a day.  I imagine it's not a big deal to leave it running, but I 
might as well disable it if I'm not going to use it most times.  I gather 
it'd be really nice on those days when I'm making a *lot* of outgoing 
connections, but most days we're talking two ssh connections at once, so 
it's not really any savings to me.  I actually knew of ssh-agent (because a 
friend uses it) but hadn't heard the name and thus hadn't made the 
connection.   It all makes sense now!

>         I eventually want to have a discussion of all the cool things
>you can do with ssh, too.  Most people only use it for one thing, and
>while it's a great secure telnet replacement, there are so many more cool
>things you can do with it.  Sometime after firewalls, I suspect.

Sounds like a great idea.  scp (secure copy) is my friend, and I'm sure 
there are plenty of other useful things that can be done with it that I've 
never thought to try!