SSH Tutorial for Linux - Support Documentation

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SSH Tutorial for Linux

This document covers the SSH client on the Linux Operating System and other OSes that use OpenSSH. If you use
Windows, please read the document SSH Tutorial for Windows If you use Mac OS X or other Unix based system,
you should already have OpenSSH installed and can use this document as a reference.
This article is one of the top tutorials covering SSH on the Internet. It was originally written back in 1999 and was
completely revised in 2006 to include new and more accurate information. As of October, 2008, it has been read by
over 473,600 people and consistently appears at the top of Google's search results for SSH Tutorial and Linux SSH.

Contents
1 What Is SSH?
2 Getting Started
3 Generating a key
3.1 Installing your public key manually
3.2 Installing your public key automatically
4 Using the ssh-agent program
5 X11 Session Forwarding
6 TCP Port Forwarding
7 SOCKS5 proxying
8 Running Commands Over SSH
9 Using SCP
10 Keeping Your SSH Session Alive
11 Ending your SSH session
12 External References
13 Credits

What Is SSH?
There are a couple of ways that you can access a shell (command line) remotely on most Linux/Unix systems. One
of the older ways is to use the telnet program, which is available on most network capable operating systems.
Accessing a shell account through the telnet method though poses a danger in that everything that you send or
receive over that telnet session is visible in plain text on your local network, and the local network of the machine
you are connecting to. So anyone who can "sni" the connection in-between can see your username, password,
email that you read, and commands that you run. For these reasons you need a more sophisticated program than
telnet to connect to a remote host.

An unencrypted telnet session

SSH, which is an acronym for Secure SHell, was designed and created to provide the best security when accessing
another computer remotely. Not only does it encrypt the session, it also provides better authentication facilities, as
well as features like secure le transfer, X session forwarding, port forwarding and more so that you can increase
the security of other protocols. It can use dierent forms of encryption ranging anywhere from 512 bit on up to as
high as 32768 bits and includes ciphers like AES (Advanced Encryption Scheme), Triple DES, Blowsh, CAST128 or
Arcfour. Of course, the higher the bits, the longer it will take to generate and use keys as well as the longer it will
take to pass data over the connection.

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An encrypted ssh session

These two diagrams on the left show how a telnet session can be viewed by anyone on the network by using a
sniing program like Ethereal (now called Wireshark) or tcpdump. It is really rather trivial to do this and so anyone
on the network can steal your passwords and other information. The rst diagram shows user jsmith logging in to a
remote server through a telnet connection. He types his username jsmith and password C0lts06!, which are
viewable by anyone who is using the same networks that he is using.
The second diagram shows how the data in an encrypted connection like SSH is encrypted on the network and so
cannot be read by anyone who doesn't have the session-negotiated keys, which is just a fancy way of saying the
data is scrambled. The server still can read the information, but only after negotiating the encrypted session with
the client.
When I say scrambled, I don't mean like the old cable pay channels where you can still kinda see things and hear
the sound, I mean really scrambled. Usually encryption means that the data has been changed to such a degree
that unless you have the key, its really hard to crack the code with a computer. It will take on the order of years for
commonly available computer hardware to crack the encrypted data. The premise being that by the time you could
crack it, the data is worthless.

Getting Started
This tutorial isn't going to cover how to install SSH, but will cover how to use it for a variety of tasks. Consult your
Linux distribution's document for information on how to setup OpenSSH.
Chances are that if you are using a version of Linux that was released after 2002, that you already have OpenSSH
installed. The version of SSH that you will want to use on Linux is called OpenSSH. As of this writing (October
2009), the latest version available is 5.3, but you may encounter versions from 3.6 on up. If you are using anything
lower than version 3.9, I'd strongly advise you to upgrade it.
OpenSSH can be obtained from http://www.openssh.org/
To really make ssh useful, you need a shell account on a remote machine, such as on a Suso account.
The rst thing we'll do is simply connect to a remote machine. This is accomplished by running 'ssh hostname' on
your local machine. The hostname that you supply as an argument is the hostname of the remote machine that you
want to connect to. By default ssh will assume that you want to authenticate as the same user you use on your local
machine. To override this and use a dierent user, simply use remoteusername@hostname as the argument. Such
as in this example:
ssh username@username.suso.org
The rst time around it will ask you if you wish to add the remote host to a list of known_hosts, go ahead and say
yes.
The authenticity of host 'arvo.suso.org (216.9.132.134)' can't be established. RSA key ngerprint is
53:b4:ad:c8:51:17:99:4b:c9:08:ac:c1:b6:05:71:9b. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'arvo.suso.org' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
It is important to pay attention to this question however because this is one of SSH's major features. Host
validation. To put it simply, ssh will check to make sure that you are connecting to the host that you think you are
connecting to. That way if someone tries to trick you into logging into their machine instead so that they can sni
your SSH session, you will have some warning, like this:
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
The RSA host key for arvo.suso.org has changed, and the key for the according IP address 216.9.137.122 is
unchanged. This could either mean that DNS SPOOFING is happening or the IP address for the host and its host
key have changed at the same time. Oending key for IP in /home/suso/.ssh/known_hosts:10
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

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IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Someone could be eavesdropping on you right
now (man-in-the-middle attack)! It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed. The ngerprint for
the RSA key sent by the remote host is 96:92:62:15:90:ec:40:12:47:08:00:b8:f8:4b:df:5b. Please contact your
system administrator. Add correct host key in /home/suso/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message. Oending
key in /home/suso/.ssh/known_hosts:53 RSA host key for arvo.suso.org has changed and you have requested strict
checking. Host key verication failed.
If you ever get a warning like this, you should stop and determine if there is a reason for the remote server's host
key to change (such as if SSH was upgraded or the server itself was upgraded). If there is no good reason for the
host key to change, then you should not try to connect to that machine until you have contacted its administrator
about the situation. If this is your own machine that you are trying to connect to, you should do some computer
forensics to determine if the machine was hacked (yes, Linux can be hacked). Or maybe your home computer's IP
address has changed such as if you have a dynamic IP address for DSL. One time I received this message when
trying to connect to my home machine's DSL line. I thought it was odd since I hadn't upgraded SSH or anything on
my home machine and so I choose not to try to override the cached key. It was a good thing that I didn't try
because I found out that my dynamic IP address had changed and that out of chance, another Linux machine
running OpenSSH took my old IP.
After saying yes, it will prompt you for your password on the remote system. If the username that you specied
exists and you type in the remote password for it correctly then the system should let you in. If it doesn't, try again
and if it still fails, you might check with the administrator that you have an account on that machine and that your
username and password is correct.

Generating a key
Now that you have spent all that time reading and are now connected, go ahead and logout.;-) Once you're back to
your local computer's command prompt enter the command 'ssh-keygen -t dsa'.
ssh-keygen -t dsa
It should begin spitting out the following:
Generating public/private dsa key pair. Enter le in which to save the key (/home/localuser/.ssh/id_dsa): Enter
passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identication has been saved in
/home/localuser/.ssh/id_dsa. Your public key has been saved in /home/localuser/.ssh/id_dsa.pub. The key ngerprint
is: 93:58:20:56:72:d7:bd:14:86:9f:42:aa:82:3d:f8:e5 localuser@mybox.home.com
It will prompt you for the location of the keyle. Unless you have already created a keyle in the default location,
you can accept the default by pressing 'enter'.
Next it will ask you for a passphrase and ask you to conrm it. The idea behind what you should use for a
passphrase is dierent from that of a password. Ideally, you should choose something unique and unguessable, just
like your password, but it should probably be something much longer, like a whole sentence. Here are some
examples of passphrases I've used in the past:
The right thing changes from state to state
the purpose of life is to give it purpose
They're not going to guess this passphrase!
The RIAA can just suck my big ass
It is never a good day at Teletron
Some passphrases that I've used have had as many as 60 characters along with punctuation and numbers. This
makes the passphrase harder to guess. To give you an idea of how much more secure a passphrase is than a
password. Consider this. Even if you narrowed down the number of words someone could use in a passphrase to
2000 potential words, if that person used 5 words in a sentence from that 2000 word set, it would mean there are
32,000,000,000,000,000 dierent combinations. Compare this with 6,095,689,385,410,816, which is the total
possible combinations in an 8 character password using upper and lower case characters, numbers and
punctuation (about 94 potential characters). So an 8 character password has 5.25 times less combinations than a 5
word passphrase. In actuality, most people choose words from a set of 10,000 or more words, bringing the
complexity of a 5 word passphrase to 16,405 or more times greater than that of a 8 character password. So on
average, the diiculty of cracking a passphrase is much greater than any password that could be used.
Interestingly, the potential number of combinations of 8 word passphrase of someone with an adult vocabulary
(8000 words or more) is almost equal to the number of 8 character password combinations multiplied by itself or
about 16,777,216,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations.
Don't use any famous quotes or phrases for your passphrase, they may be easily guessed by another person or by a
brute force cracking program.
The reason why you would generate a keyle is so that you can increase the security of your SSH session by not
using your system password. When you generate a key, you are actually generating two key les. One private key
and one public key, which is dierent from the private key. The private key should always stay on your local

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computer and you should take care not to lose it or let it fall into the wrong hands. Your public key can be put on
the machines you want to connect to in a le called .ssh/authorized_keys. The public key is safe to be viewed by
anybody and mathematically cannot be used to derive the private key. Its just like if I gave you a number
38,147,918,357 and asked you to nd the numbers and operations I used to generate that number. There are nearly
innite possibilities.
Whenever you connect via ssh to a host that has your public key loaded in the authorized_keys le, it will use a
challenge response type of authentication which uses your private key and public key to determine if you should be
granted access to that computer It will ask you for your key passphrase though. But this is your local ssh process
that is asking for your passphrase, not the ssh server on the remote side. It is asking to authenticate you according
to data in your private key. Using key based authentication instead of system password authentication may not
seem like much of a gain at rst, but there are other benets that will be explained later, such as logging in
automatically from X windows.

Installing your public key manually

If you do not have the ssh-copy-id program available, then you must use this manual method for installing your ssh
key on the remote host. Even if you do have the ssh-copy-id program, its good to do the manual installation at least
once so that you have a good understanding of what is going on, because this is where a lot of people end up
having problems.
Go ahead and copy your public key which is in ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub to the remote machine.
scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@arvo.suso.org:.ssh/authorized_keys
It will ask you for your system password on the remote machine and after authenticating it will transfer the le.
You may have to create the .ssh directory in your home directory on the remote machine rst. By the way, scp is a
le transfer program that uses ssh. We'll talk more about it later.
Now when ssh to the remote machine, it should ask you for your key passphrase instead of your password. If it
doesn't, it could be that the permissions and mode of the authorized_keys le and .ssh directory on the remote
server need to be set more restrictively. You can do that with these commands on the remote server:
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
You can also put the public key in the remote authorized_keys le by simply copying it into your paste buer,
logging into the remote machine and pasting it directly into the le from an editor like vi, emacs or nano. I would
recommend using the 'cat' program to view the contents of the public key le though because using less will end
up breaking the single line into multiple lines.
cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub

Installing your public key automatically

A newer way that you can quite easily install your public ssh key on a remote host is with the ssh-copy-id program
like this:
ssh-copy-id yourusername@your.website.com
It will prompt you for your password on the remote host and take care of the rest. That was easy. So why didn't I
just tell you how to use this program in the rst place? Well, in my experience, many of the problems people have
with ssh revolve around trying to get their ssh public key installed correctly. Its a good thing that they've made a
program to do the dirty work for you, but in the interest of building your skills, you should at least do the manual
install once so that you know what is involved.

Using the ssh-agent program

The true usefulness of using key based authentication comes in the use of the ssh-agent program. Usually, the
ssh-agent program is a program that starts up before starting X windows and in turn starts X windows for you. All
X windows programs inherit a connection back to the ssh-agent, including your terminal windows like Gnome
Terminal, Konsole, xfce4-terminal, aterm, xterm and so on. What this means is that after you've started up X
windows through ssh-agent, you can use the ssh-add program to add your passphrase one time to the agent and
the agent will in turn pass this authentication information automatically every time you need to use your
passphrase. So the next time you run:
ssh username@arvo.suso.org
you will be logged in automatically without having to enter a passphrase or password. Most recent distributions
will automatically start ssh-agent when you login to X windows through a session manager like gdm (graphical
login). I found that as of this writing the following distributions started ssh-agent by default.
Debian
Fedora

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Gentoo
SuSE
Ubuntu
Most distributions prior to about 2002 did not start it.
Don't worry if you don't see your distro listed in here. You can check if it is already running by running this
command.
ps auxw
If there is an ssh-agent process listed there, then you can just start using it, otherwise, you should consult your
distribution's documentation on OpenSSH and running the ssh-agent.
Once you've veried that ssh-agent is running, you can add your ssh key to it by running the ssh-add command:
ssh-add
If the program nds the DSA key that you created above, it will prompt you for the passphrase. Once you have
done so it should tell you that it has added your identity to the ssh-agent:
Identity added: /home/username/.ssh/id_dsa (/home/username/.ssh/id_dsa)
Now you can try logging into that remote machine again and this time you will notice that it just logs you right in
without prompting you for any password or passphrase.
To make adding your passphrase easier, you can add the ssh-add program to your desktop session startup
programs and it will bring up a prompt in X windows to ask for your passphrase every time you login to your
desktop. You should also have the gtk2-askpass program installed. Or x11-askpass. They are the real programs that
actually prompt you for your password. ssh-add just runs them if its not being run in a terminal. Below is a
screenshot of the Gnome Sessions Conguration dialog with ssh-add added to the startup programs.

Gnome Session with ssh-add program set to run and

prompt for your key's passphrase

X11 Session Forwarding

One lesser known feature of X windows is its network transparency. It was designed to be able to transmit window
and bitmap information over a network connection. So essentially you can login to a remote desktop machine and
run some X windows program like Gnumeric, Gimp or even Firefox and the program will run on the remote
computer, but will display its graphical output on your local computer.
To try this out, you will need an account on a remote computer that has X windows installed with some X windows
applications. suso.org servers do not have any such programs so you will need to either login to one of your other
workstations or another server that does have them. The key to making it work is using the -X option, which means
"forward the X connection through the SSH connection". This is a form of tunneling.
ssh -X username@desktopmachine.domain.com
If this doesn't work, you may have to setup the SSH daemon on the remote computer to allow X11Forwarding,
check that the following lines are set in /etc/ssh/sshd_cong on that computer:
X11Forwarding yes X11DisplayOset 10 X11UseLocalhost yes

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For some newer programs and newer versions of X windows, you may need to use the -Y option instead for trusted
X11 forwarding. Try using this option if your X11 windows program fails to start running with a message like this
one that was for Gimp:
The program 'gimp-2.2' received an X Window System error. This probably reects a bug in the program. The error
was 'BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)'. (Details: serial 154 error_code 3 request_code 38 minor_code 0)
(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while
after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You
can then get a meaningful backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

TCP Port Forwarding

Like X11 session forwarding, SSH can also forward other TCP application level ports both forward and backwards
across the SSH session that you establish.
For example, you can setup a port forward for your connection from your home machine to arvo.suso.org so that it
will take connections to localhost port 3306 and forward them to the remote side mysql.suso.org port 3306. Port
3306 is the port that the MySQL server listens on, so this would allow you to bypass the normal host checks that
the MySQL server would make and allow you to run GUI MySQL programs on your local computer while using the
database on your suso account. Here is the command to accomplish this:
ssh -L 3306:mysql.suso.org:3306 username@arvo.suso.org
The -L (which means Local port) takes one argument of
<local-port>:<connect-to-host>:<connect-to-port>
so you specify what host and port the connection will go to on the other side of the SSH connection. When you
make a connection to the <local-port> port, it sends the data through the SSH connection and then connects to
<connect-to-host>:<connect-to-port> on the other side. From the point of view of <connect-to-host>, its as if the
connection came from the SSH server that you login to. In the case above, arvo.suso.org.
This is much like a VPN connection allows you to act like you are making connections from the remote network
that you VPN into.
Take a moment to think of other useful connections you can make with this type of network tunnel.
Another useful one is for when you are away from home and can't send mail through your home ISP's mail server
because it only allows local connections to block spam. You can create an SSH tunnel to an SSH server that is local
to your ISP and then have your GUI mail client like Thunderbird make a connection to localhost port 8025 to send
the mail. Here is the command to create the tunnel:
ssh -L 8025:smtp.homeisp.net:25 username@shell.homeisp.net
One thing to note is that non-root users do not normally have the ability to listen on network ports lower than 1024,
so listening on port 25 would not work, thus we use 8025. It really doesn't matter, you can use any port as long as
your email client can connect to it.
You can also reverse the direction and create a reverse port forward. This can be useful if you want to connect to a
machine remotely to allow connections back in. For instance, I use this sometimes so that I can create a reverse
port 22 (SSH) tunnel so that I can reconnect through SSH to a machine that is behind a rewall once I have gone
away from that network.
ssh -R 8022:localhost:22 username@my.home.ip.address
This will connect to my home machine and start listening on port 8022 there. Once I get home, I can then connect
back to the machine I created the connection from using the following command:
ssh -p 8022 username@localhost
Remember to use the right username for the machine that you started the tunnel from. It can get confusing. You
also have to keep in mind that since you are connecting to the host called localhost, but its really a port going to a
dierent SSH server, you may wind up with a dierent host key for localhost the next time you connect to localhost.
In that case you would need to edit your .ssh/known_hosts le to remove the localhost line. You really should know
more about SSH before doing this blindly.
As a nal exercise, you can keep your reverse port forward open all the time by starting the connection with this
loop:
while true; do ssh -R 8022:localhost:22 suso@my.home.ip.address; sleep 60; done
This way, if you happen to reboot your home machine, the reverse tunnel will try to reconnect after 60 seconds.
Provided you've setup keys and your ssh-agent on the remote machine.;-)

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SOCKS5 proxying
So thats great and all, but eventually you are going to want to know how you can do tunneling without having to
specify the address that you want to forward to.
This is accomplished through the -D SOCKS5 option.
ssh -D 9999 username@remotehost.net
Any application that supports the SOCKS5 protocol (and most of the big network programs do) can forward its
network connection over SSH and dynamically forward to any hostname that you specify. So for a web browser, any
URL that you type in the URL eld, would be sent through the SSH tunnel. Firefox, Xchat, Gaim and many others
all support using SOCKS5. The setting is usually under preferences in the connection settings.
Remember, in the words of Benjamin "Uncle Ben" Parker, with great power comes great responsibility. Just because
you can get around rewalls and use other hosts for sending network traic, doesn't mean that some system
administrator isn't going to notice you.

Running Commands Over SSH

Sometimes you don't really want to run a shell like Bash on the host you are connecting to. Maybe you just want to
run a command and exit. This is very simply accomplished by putting the command you wish to run at the end of
your ssh connection command.
ssh username@remotehost.net ls -l /
This will probably generate output similar to the following.
total 220 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 9 04:08 bin drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 11 09:29 boot drwxr-xr-x 23
root root 122880 Nov 14 02:36 dev drwxr-xr-x 68 root root 12288 Jan 10 04:03 etc drwxr-xr-x 189 root root 4096
Jan 9 00:40 home drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 12 2004 initrd drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Nov 9 04:07 lib
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Sep 26 2004 lost+found drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 14 2004 misc drwxr-xr-x 6 root
root 4096 Nov 12 02:11 mnt drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 15 22:17 opt dr-xr-xr-x 307 root root 0 Nov 14 02:36
proc drwx------ 44 root root 8192 Jan 9 16:23 root drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8192 Nov 9 04:08 sbin drwxr-xr-x 2 root
root 4096 Mar 12 2004 selinux drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 0 Nov 14 02:36 sys drwxrwxrwt 20 root root 4096 Jan 10
06:46 tmp drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4096 Dec 7 2004 usr drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 4096 Jan 10 2005 var
Then you can process the output however you want using the normal shell conventions.
You can also do something called forced-command where you force any login attempt to run a specic command
regardless of what is specied on the command line by the client.
To do this, you put this variable and the command you want to force in the authorized_keys le on the remote host:
command="/usr/bin/backup" ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvna.....
Put the variable before the start of the line for the key. There are other variables you can use here like from="" to
allow only from a specic host. These variables can be put together separated by commas.

(This space is intentionally left blank)

Using SCP
SCP is basically a program that uses the SSH protocol to send les between hosts over and encrypted connection.
You can transfer les from your local computer to a remote host or vice versa or even from a remote host to
another remote host.
Here is a basic command that copies a le called report.doc from the local computer to a le by the same name on
the remote computer.
scp report.doc username@remote.host.net:
Note how the lack of a destination lename just preserves the original name of the le. This is also the case if the

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remote destination includes the path to a directory on the remote host.

To copy the le back from the server, you just reverse the from and to.
scp username@remote.host.net:report.doc report.doc
If you want to specify a new name for the le on the remote computer, simply give the name after the colon on the
to side.
scp report.doc username@remote.host.net:monday.doc
Or if you want to copy it to a directory relative to the home directory for the remote user specied.
scp report.doc username@remote.host.net:reports/monday.doc
You can also use fullpaths which are preceded with a /.
To copy a whole directory recursively to a remote location, use the -r option. The following command copies a
directory named mail to the home directory of the user on the remote computer.
scp -r mail username@remote.host.net:
Sometimes you will want to preserve the timestamps of the les and directories and if possible, the users, groups
and permissions. To do this, use the -p option.
scp -rp mail username@remote.host.net:

Keeping Your SSH Session Alive

Sometimes you may have trouble keeping your SSH session up and idle. For whatever reason, the connection just
dies after X minutes of inactivity. Usually this happens because there is a rewall between you and the internet that
is congured to only keep stateful connections in its memory for 15 or so minutes.
Fortunately, in recent versions of OpenSSH, there is a x for this problem. Simply put the following:
Host * Protocol 2 TCPKeepAlive yes ServerAliveInterval 60
in the le
~/.ssh/cong
The le above can be used for any client side SSH conguration. See the ssh_cong man page for more details. The
'TCPKeepAlive yes' directive tells the ssh client that it should send a little bit of data over the connection
periodically to let the server know that it is still there. 'ServerAliveInterval 60' sets this time period for these
messages to 60 seconds. This tricks many rewalls that would otherwise drop the connection, to keep your
connection going.

Ending your SSH session

All good things come to an end. And there are many common ways to end your SSH session.
exit
logout
(Ctrl-d)
The last one is actually the user pressing the 'Ctrl' key and the letter 'd' at the same time. These all are ways of
terminating the SSH session from the server side. They usually exit the shell which in turn logs you o the
machine.
What you may not know, is that there is another way to close an SSH session. This is useful if you lose connectivity
with the machine and you have no way of ending your shell session. For example, this happens momentarily if you
stay logged into a machine while it is shutdown. SSH has its own command line escape sequences. These can be
used to end connections, create new port forwards or list current ones and a few other functions. To end a
connection even when you don't have a command prompt, type return twice (for good measure) and then the
sequence '~.'. That's a tilde followed by a period.
(RETURN) (RETURN) ~.
This will terminate the SSH connection from the client end instead of the server end.
Happy SSH'ing!

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SSH Tutorial for Linux - Support Documentation

https://support.suso.com/supki/SSH_Tutorial_for...

External References
Here are some links where you can nd more information about SSH
Mark's presentation notes from the January 2006 BLUG meeting
OpenSSH Website
The SSH FAQ
Secure Shell article in Wikipedia
The old non-wiki version of this tutorial (last modied 2007-08-04)
The much older version of this tutorial (1999-02-21)
Linked to by digg.com front page (2006-03-03) (823 diggs!)
This tutorial was cited by Patent #WO2009077781 A1

Credits
Original document, graphics and examples by Mark Krenz (mark@suso.org)
Thank you to the following people for sending corrections:
Zake Stahl (Several corrections)
Christopher Mylonas (noticing that MySQL should be 3306, not 3066)
Tehiri Tehiri (Suggesting a clarication in the username and password prompt section)
Behrang Saeedzadeh (Noticing contact typo)
Pratik Mallya (Suggesting I mention ssh-copy-id)
Other people listed on the history page of this document.
Retrieved from "https://support.suso.com/w/index.php?title=SSH_Tutorial_for_Linux&oldid=414"
Category:
Shell
Copyright 2004-2009 Suso Technology Services, Inc.
101 W.Kirkwood Ave Ste 222
Bloomington, Indiana

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