•

An Excruciatingly Detailed Guide To SSH

An Excruciatingly Detailed Guide To SSH (But Only The Things I Actually Find Useful) · Graham Helton

https://grahamhelton.com/blog/ssh-cheatsheet

Welcome We&rsquo;ve all seen these great diagrams of how SSH port forwarding works but if your brain is anything like mine, these diagrams leave you with a lot of unanswered questions. If you&rsquo;re on a red team, understanding how to traverse a network better than the people who designed it gives you immense power to do evil things. SSH is such a powerful tool but sometimes the syntax and other concepts can get in the way of us accomplishing our goals.

An Excruciatingly Detailed Guide To SSH (But Only The Things I Actually Find Useful) · Graham Helton

11 comments

See all comments

neocamel

•

I can understand why so many programmers suffer from imposter syndrome.

I know more about SSH than anyone I know, but I still read articles like this and think, "SOCKS proxy. Huh. I don't actually know what either of those words mean."

Before anyone jumps in to educate me on what SOCKS is (please do though!), my point is that through my entire career in tech, I've always read articles and had to skim over terms and acronyms that I didn't know, unless I wanted to fall into a ten-hour rabbit hole of learning, where I ultimately feel totally overwhelmed and not sure I'm actually smarter than when I woke up this morning.

Seems like an interesting article, but for me to fully grasp it, I'd need to read like six other articles, which I can't do during my morning coffee/mindless scroll time.

I've taken the approach of learning through osmosis. I'll regularly read articles that I don't fully understand, assuming that I'll eventually gain a better understanding of whatever topic I'm reading about over time.

Shaman

•

Most people apply socks directly to their feet for warmth. If you mean the Internet protocol I can't help you, but I'd be interested in learning about it too!

wgs

•

SOCKS is just a generic proxy protocol. It lets you tunnel TCP traffic between two hosts transparently. SSH can be use to setup this kind of tunnel using -D.

Lem453

•

Don't feel bad. Nearly all the critical systems for computers I generally represent at least 1 person's (sometimes many peoples) life work. You can't possibly understand every aspect of everything program your computer uses.

I suspect there is not a single person in the world that fully understands every aspect of GRUB, SSH and systemd. There is simply too many fine details in these things to understand everything.

No need to feel bad. Your biggest power is the one you take for granted: your ability to Google and educate yourself when needed. Many people can't do that effectively.