Secure shell (SSH)

What you will need

• Time: 5 minutes.

• Basic knowledge of SSH

What you will get

• Useful shortcuts for using SSH in Duckietown.

SSH, or Secure Shell, is a protocol to remote control computers, which comes in handy in robotics too. In this section we provide shortcuts useful in the context of Duckietown daily operations.

Note: in the future you will have to debug problems, and these problems might be harder to understand if you rely blindly on the shortcuts.

SSH aliases

Instead of using

ssh duckie@![ROBOT].local

You can set up SSH so that you can use:

ssh ![ROBOT]

During your init_sd_card process described later in the book, the command will automatically setup ~/.ssh/config. If you are having trouble using it, you can follow the instructions below.

To manually create an SSH alias, create a host section in ~/.ssh/config on your laptop with the following contents:

Host ![ROBOT]
    User duckie
    Hostname ![ROBOT].local

Note that this does not let you do

ping ![ROBOT]

You haven’t created another hostname, just an alias for SSH.

However, you can use the alias with all the tools that rely on SSH, including rsync and scp.