Norse Technologies Knowledge Base Free Knowledge Articles

Many thanks to Jon Lee at jonlee.ca for this excellent procedure allowing for the automtic login of a session using SSH and puTTY.exe terminal emulator. You da man!

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From his site:

As many web developers can attest to, logging into your server through SSH (Secure Shell) is one of the more common day-to-day tasks (you can even use it as a secure tunnel for your traffic). It only makes sense to automate this process which in turn can save many many keystrokes.

This how-to is written with PuTTY and Windows in mind and requires several other tools that are available from PuTTY’s website. So from their download page, make sure you have these files:

• PuTTY (putty.exe)
• PuTTYgen (puttygen.exe)

Then to automate SSH login, do the following:

1. Run PuTTYgen.
2. Select SSH-2 DSA as the Type of Key to generate.
3. Click generate and move your mouse around to generate randomness.
4. Click “Save Private Key” and save it somewhere on your computer.
5. Copy the entire content inside the box to your clipboard (this is your generated public key).
6. Login to your SSH server.
7. Create the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys containing the generated public key (from step 3) on a single line.
8. Make this file readable (chmod 755).
9. Then open up PuTTY and navigate to Connection->Data and fill in the auto-login username.
10. Navigate to Connection->SSH->Auth and under Private-key, browse to the file you had saved earlier on your computer.

That’s it! Now you can try logging in to your SSH server and it should login automatically. If it works, make sure you save your session so you don’t have to repeat these steps every time!

Hopefully these steps work for everyone! Let me know if there are any problems.

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Had some problems with a CentOS5 server not accepting keys… found that this server was being finicky for some reason, and used this article on how to generate the keys on the Linux server, and then import the public key to the client Windows box. To make it automatically login simply do not enter any passphrase. This is probably a huge security risk or something like that, but if you’re using it on a secured LAN then perhaps it’s ok.

Posted under Linux, Network

From Linuxquestions.org:

“There are probably several methods, but one is to use find to produce a list of all files (not directories) and then execute chmod on each of them. For example

find /my/directory -type f -exec chmod 644 '{}' +

Change the red parts to fit your needs. If you wonder what that ‘{}’ is..well, you may have guessed that it’s where the filelist is being put when exec’ing the given command on each file.

You can also first try the command without chmod’ing to see that it affects the right files:

find /my/directory -type f

The above would find all regular files (not directories, for example) from within /my/directory.

If the command happens to throw you an error about the exec part, chances are it’s because of the plus sign (+) that ends the exec part. In this case try replacing the plus (+) with an escaped semicolon (\;) so it becomes

find /my/directory -type f -exec chmod 644 '{}' \;

On some machines I remember that it worked with semicolon (which needs a backslash in front of it, to protect it from being interpreted by your shell), but on my current installation it’s the plus sign (without a backslash).

Another way would probably be to list all regular files on the directory (using either find or any tool that can just list all files without directories) and then pipe the output to xargs with which the chmod was run.”

and from http://movabletripe.com/archive/recursively-chmod-directories-only/

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June 19th, 2006

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

This will recursively search your directory tree (starting at dir ‘dot’) and chmod 755 all directories only.

Similarly, the following will chmod all files only (and ignore the directories):

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

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Posted under Linux