Jared Smith » tips and tricks http://www.jaredsmith.net Thoughts of a Traveling Geek Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:53:54 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 The Little Things You Find Along the Way http://www.jaredsmith.net/2008/11/05/the-little-things-you-find-along-the-way/ http://www.jaredsmith.net/2008/11/05/the-little-things-you-find-along-the-way/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:36:18 +0000 jsmith http://www.jaredsmith.name/?p=12 I’m constantly amazed by the little tips and tricks I stumble upon as I’m working to solve problems.  Earlier today, I found this little gem.

Apparently, there is a setting in OpenSSH 5.1 and later for visual remote host fingerprinting.  The basic concept is that it’s much easier for the human brain to notice a change in a visual pattern than in a string of hex digits.  To turn it on, simply add a line that says
VisualHostKey yes to your ~/.ssh/config file. Then, when you go to SSH into a server, you’ll see a visual representation of the remote host fingerprint, in addition to the regular fingerprint, as shown below:

[jsmith@hockey ~]$ ssh fedorapeople.org
Host key fingerprint is 07:d4:02:db:9f:70:d5:2d:7f:1b:6a:df:83:73:95:1d
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
|      ....  .. . |
|       +. ..  o .|
|      . +..    o |
|         = .   Eo|
|        S +   . B|
|         .   o oo|
|            . o o|
|             o +.|
|              o .|
+-----------------+

See, now isn’t that handy?

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