The preferred protocol for connecting to the Department from your home ISP or from another remote computer is SSH or Secure Shell. This protocol provides for the encryption of traffic in transit making it very difficult for a third party to snoop or listen in.

We operate ssh servers on our time-sharing servers. SSH clients must be used to access the EECS time-sharing servers from outside the Department.

There are a number of available ssh clients for Unix, Windows and Macintosh.

SSH From One Host To Another Without Entering A Password By default, you will be able to connect by SSH from any tech-supported departmental Unix machine to any other tech-supported departmental Unix machine without requiring a password.

If you would like to be able to connect to a non-tech-supported SSH server without entering a password, you will need to carry out a simple two-step process yourself.

First, run 'ssh-keygen' on one of the departmental Unix hosts:

% ssh-keygen -t rsa -N ""
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/eecs/home/xxx/.ssh/id_rsa):

Hit "ENTER" to create the public key file, .ssh/id_rsa.pub and the private key file .ssh/id_rsa.

On the system that you would like to login to, you will now need to append the contents of the newly created .ssh/id_rsa.pub file to the .ssh/authorized_keys file. If the file does not exist, create it. Now, you will be able to ssh to your host from any departmental Unix system without requiring a password.