Remote Connection through SSH

Part 2 - “Creating a Virtual Development Environment”

In the previous article to this series, we got our Ubuntu server appliance up and running. We can also access it directly through our VMWare client. In this article, we will look at how to connect to our VM through SSH in order to run commands from a Telnet client, as well as FTP into our server.

Using a Telnet Client

Macs come with a built in Telnet client. Windows machines do not. I use PuTTY as my Telnet Client.

You can download it here:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html.

There are many applications offered as PuTTY, but you only need the “PuTTY (the Telnet and SSH client itself)”.

Because putty.exe is just an executable, I manually setup a directory and store it in C:\Program Files\Putty\putty.exe, along with all my other applications and then create a shortcut to it that I store elsewhere.

Run your virtual appliance. When the server first ran we saw this window

In my case, it told me my IP address for the virtual appliance is: 192.168.91.128. Your address might be different. If you are no longer at this window, you can either type “exit” or type “ifconfig” to obtain the IP address as seen below:

Open Putty and in field “Host Name”, type the appliance’s IP address, and then click Open. If you are going to access this address often, you can save it as a session. We now have a telnet into the appliance. You can either enter as your username/password, u:sysadmin / p:sysadmin or u:root / p:pass. You will be able to navigate as you do when accessing the appliance through VMWare along with all the same privileges as the user you logged in as.

Using an FTP Client through SSH

Most FTP Clients have the ability to connect through SSH tunneling. I use WinSCP (http://winscp.net/eng/download.php) to FTP because it integrates with Putty and offers the ability to execute commands through a simple dialog as well as through Putty integration. To be thorough I will go over how to use WinSCP to connect to the appliance.

After you have downloaded and installed WinSCP, launch the application. There are really only 3 fields you need to fill out:

Host name: IP Address of your appliance
User name: root
Password: pass (or the password you assigned to root)

Then save the session. Now select the session and login. You now have the ability to navigate the appliance directory like you can any other system. I like WinSCP because it supports drag n’ drop from anywhere on your local machine into the interface. I sometimes use WinSCP for file creation and modification, permissions on files and directories and other common tasks versus using telnet.