Setup SSH from chromebook to home desktop
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I write many of these posts from a 10 year old desktop that sits in my office these days. It does a very fine job running all of the things I need it to for...

Date: March 8, 2022

I write many of these posts from a 10 year old desktop that sits in my office these days. It does a very fine job running all of the things I need it to for my side work, but sometimes I want a mobile setup. I don’t really want to spend the $$ on a new laptop just for the few times I want to be somewhere else in the house. What I do have though is a chromebook.

I’ve tried to get the chromebook into my workflow in the past, but have failed. Much because by the time I got all of my tools up and running in the linux vm it was taking up quite a bit of space on the device and made it harder for others to use as a chromebook.

Today I am giving it a second try, but this time with ssh.

Checking for existing sshd
──────────────────────────

Before doing anything I checked to see if sshd is already running. Using the following command.

[code]
  sudo service ssh status
  # or
  pgrep -l sshd

Both returned nothing so I know that its not running.

setting up sshd
───────────────

just apt install it

Next install the openssh-client and openssh-server

[code]
  sudo apt install openssh-client -y
  sudo apt install openssh-server -y

After this I can see that its now running by checking its status once again.

[code]
  sudo service ssh status

Gives me the result.

[code]
  ● ssh.service - OpenBSD Secure Shell server
       Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/ssh.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
       Active: active (running) since Tue 2022-03-08 08:17:05 CST; 12min ago
         Docs: man:sshd(8)
               man:sshd_config(5)
      Process: 181185 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/sshd -t (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
     Main PID: 181189 (sshd)
        Tasks: 1 (limit: 19119)
       Memory: 2.8M
          CPU: 96ms
       CGroup: /system.slice/ssh.service
               └─181189 sshd: /usr/sbin/sshd -D [listener] 0 of 10-100 startups

Accessing the desktop
─────────────────────

I have already enabled the Linux terminal on my chromebook, so I just opened the terminal, and ran the following.

[code]
  ssh <username>@<ip-address>

It prompted for my password and I was in. I had all of my vim, tmux, and zsh comforts that I enjoy without installing anything. It worked so well that this whole post was written from my chromebook.

Limitations
───────────

This does limit me to being on the same network as my desktop, which these days is almost always true.

ssh keys
────────

Out of the box I am just using passwords to get in, but if this were public I would lock down to requiring an ssh key to enter. I’ll likey do this in a future post.