From Password Reset Mechanisms to OpenID: A Brief Discussion of Online Password Security

I tripped over
an article
this week on creating “SSH Bookmarks”, which are basically aliases for
hostnames within your ~/.ssh/config file.

I think this is pretty cool, but I’ve been doing something I think is
superior for a while now: Bash aliases for the entire SSH command.

So while the SSH Bookmark idea has us typing the following:

# ssh bookmark

ssh server

…which is easier than ssh [email protected]…why not just use a bash
alias and type a single character?

# bash alias

s

That’s one key (not counting enter). And if you’re worried about
collisions with existing commands, make it two characters…or three, etc.

Even better, if you use SSH keys1 this can drop you right to a prompt
without even entering a password on the server side. So yes, SSH bookmarks
are pretty cool, but if we’re making the effort to reduce keystrokes, why
not utilize what’s available and go all the way? ::

Notes

1 If you’re going for the instant shell access, i.e. not having to enter a
password on the server side, you need to either have a password on your SSH
key or be dropping in as a non-root user. Don’t easy yourself into stupid.2
The alias within .aliases looks like so: alias b=”ssh
[email protected]”