Department of Computing Imperial College
Q&A on Apple Macs

Can I ssh to the Mac G5s?
How can I access my account from outside DoC?
How do I get my Mac to use the latest DoC SSL certificate?


Can I ssh to the Mac G5s?

Logging in remotely over ssh can be achieved in one of two ways. It cannot be accomplished by simply ssh-ing in and typing in your password due to a current limitation with the ssh installation.

The first alternative is to ssh into a Linux machine first and then into a Mac. This allows you to log in by passing the Kerberos ticket from the first machine to the second.

The second method is to use public-key authentication. If you don't already have a public-private ssh keypair, run ssh-keygen (see the manual page), then:

mkdir -p ~/.macintosh/.ssh
cp -a ~/.ssh/* ~/.macintosh/.ssh

How can I access my account from outside DoC?

If you have Mac OS X 10.2.3 or newer try Fugu. Basically this is a nice GUI on top of various SSH-based services such as SFTP and SCP. This is reliable, pretty simple, operating on a copy rather than the original which has to be copied back, no resource fork support. This is installed on the lab machines.

How do I get my Mac to use the latest DoC SSL certificate?

This is for non-CSG maintained Macs.

Using self-signed certificates:

  1. Download certificate: www.doc.ic.ac.uk/csg/ssl/ICDoC_CA.crt

  2. Open Terminal

  3. cp /System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors Library/Keychains

  4. certtool i ICDoC_CA.crt k-X509Anchors -d

  5. sudo cp Library/Keychains/X509Anchors /System/Library/Keychains
Obviously the above example assumes you've saved the file in the top directory. Also you have to know the admin password.

(13/01/06)

© CSG / 2006