The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers

Posted Jun 21, 2006 20:02 UTC (Wed) by landley (guest, #6789)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers

I've been using dropbear for years now, it's actually pretty nice. It's
been the default ssh server/client in the embedded space since about 2004,
and I'm unaware of anything interesting openssh does that dropbear
doesn't.

Setup's fairly easy too: extract the tarball and run the standard
"./configure; make; make install", then set up a host key.

Right after running ./configure I edit options.h to comment out
the #defines for DROPBEAR_SMALL_CODE, DO_HOST_LOOKUP and DO_MOTD, and I
set DROPBEAR_RANDOM_DEV to "/dev/urandom", but all of that's just tweaks I
could live without.

After install you need to create a host key, ala:

mkdir /etc/dropbear
./dropbearkey -t dss -f /etc/dropbear/dropbear_dss_host_key -s 2048

Then just run dropbear and you should be able to ssh to your machine.
(Try the loopback port.)

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to SSH servers

Posted Jun 21, 2006 22:05 UTC (Wed) by ehovland (subscriber, #2284) [Link]

> I've been using dropbear for years now, it's actually pretty nice.

Just to say, me too!

Dropbear is the default client and server for the familiar distribution for handhelds running linux.

There have been a few issues that the familiar group has had to patch over and over again. For example, 2048-bit keys can cause a core dump on the dropbear ssh client, and only because dropbear does not allocate enough space for a key that size. But that issue is minor when one wants ssh on a small device (and let me tell you, ssh on a small device is handy).