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Chapter 4: Secure Remote Administration
much of the stuff we fling over networks as possible, we leverage this flexibility as
fully as we can.
Getting and Installing OpenSSH
Nowadays, OpenSSH is a standard package on all Linux distributions: it’s that
important. Accordingly, the simplest way to get OpenSSH is to install it from your
Linux CD-ROMs. Just be sure to also check your distribution’s web site for updates,
or run your distribution’s online-update tool (e.g., apt-get, yast2, up2date, etc.) to
make sure you’re using your distribution’s newest OpenSSH package. OpenSSH has
had some serious security vulnerabilities over the years.
OpenSSH’s official web site is http://www.openssh.com. This is the place to go for the
very latest version of OpenSSH, both in source-code and RPM forms, and also for
OpenSSL, which is required by OpenSSH. Also required is zlib, available at http://
www.zlib.net.
You may or may not get by with RPM packages, depending mainly on whether the
RPMs you wish to install were created for your distribution. (Mandrake, Red Hat,
SUSE, and a number of other distributions can use RPMs, but not always
interchangeably.) If for some reason your distribution doesn’t provide its own
OpenSSH RPMs, even in a “contrib.” (end-user contributed) directory, you’re best
off compiling ...