If you've been using Linux or Unix for a long time, then you're probably familiar remote technologies like rlogin, FTP, and Telnet. These are all wonderful technologies for using a computer remotely, but they are notoriously insecure due to your login credentials being transmitted over the Internet in plain text format.

SSH, which stands for Secure Shell, is a more secure replacement for rlogin and Telnet. Similarly, SFTP stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol. As the name implies, it's a more secure version of FTP.

Installing OpenSSH

OpenSSH was developed by the OpenBSD project and provides both SSH and SFTP server components. Binary packages are available in the repositories for Ubuntu and Linux Mint. In either of these distros, you can install it with:

That's all it takes to install it on your system.

Using SSH

You should now be able to log in to your system remotely by using the ssh command followed by the IP address. For example, if your remote computer's IP address is 192.168.2.1, you can log into it with:

If you'd like to log in with a different user name than the one on your local machine, for example linerd, use:

Note that the switch is a lowercase L, (short for login name).

Using SFTP

The basic usage of SFTP is similar to SSH. To access your remote computer with SFTP use the sftp command followed by your remote IP address. So if your remote machine's address is 192.168.2.1, use

If your remote user name is different from your local user name you can use a slightly modified version of the command. As an example, if your remote user name is linerd, you would use it like this:

Once you've accessed your remote machine through SFTP, the commands are similar to regular FTP.

More information

You can get information about both SSH and SFTP from the manual pages after you install the package.

For SSH:

For SFTP:

This post originally appeared at https://tuxtweaks.com/2012/07/install-ssh-sftp-server-ubuntu-linux-mint/