Access

SSH

Your server is accessible trough SSH by default. There are no personal SSH login users supported to ensure uniformity between SSH and web actions.

Hint

for security reasons, we allow key based logins only

Every aspect of the configuration is controlled through our configuration management software. There is no root access possible neither for the customer or ourself.

Shortcuts and sudo configuration

Depending on the installed services, some shortcuts are available to execute certain commands with root privileges. You will find a list of all shortcuts by typing help.

Generic devop user

A user named devop is created by default. You can log into the server with this user for debugging purposes or to execute some global tasks:

  • read access to all system log files in /var/log/

  • read access to nginx vhosts in /etc/nginx/websites/

  • read access to the global modsecurity configuration in /etc/nginx/modsecurity/

  • puppet-agent to trigger a manual configuration management run

  • reboot to trigger a manual server reboot

  • diskusage to search for big files and folders

  • iptables-list to list firewall rules and chains

  • iptables-rules to show firewall rules

  • update-ca-certificates, see CA Certificates for details

Hint

use the lnav utility to display logs in a meaningful way (lnav ~/log/ as website user, lnav as devop user for global logs)

SSH client configuration

Add client configurations to /etc/ssh/ssh_config by setting the ssh::config hash:

{
  "ssh::config": {
    "Host": "git",
    "HostName": "code.example.com",
    "User": "git"
  }
}

Hint

use man ssh_config (online version) for available configuration options

SFTP

After adding your publickey to the server, is it possible to connect over SFTP. We recommend to use one of the following clients:

Hint

To store your key in the memory and not having to enter the password for every connection - use pageant (Windows) or ssh-add it (Linux)