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. Since computers are the minds of robots, we can use SSH to remotely control Duckietown robots. 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.