On Sun, 29 Dec 2002 14:20:39 -0800 "tauzero.com/suse" <suse@tauzero.com> wrote:
I'm playing with the "webcam" program by Gerd Knorr. I've got it working nicely, it will upload an series of images from my home network to my domain on a far ISP (linux based, of course). This is all running from SuSE 8.1.
However, I have it working with ftp, and that worries me. Is the FTP sending my password in the clear? Or is the FTP that is being used in SuSE 8.1 actually secure?
In the .webcamrc file there is an option to use ssh. When I set this to "1" to enable it, every time a transfer was initiated a query for the password apppeared in the shell window - and it waited for me to type in the password. Obviously, this won't do! When ssh was set to "0", and it used ftp, it used the password set in the .webcamrc file for every transfer. That's what I want - but with security!
So *should* I worry about the ftp used by webcam in SuSE 8.1? If so, how can I get the ssh option to not prompt for the password on every transfer????
Yeah, you can generate a key pair to do this: Do a google search for "openssh key management". To be brief this is what you do: ####################################################### ssh2 does not necessarily need a password, you could use challenge-response authentication. Generate your ssh-keys with <ssh-keygen -d> for ssh2. You will have the files $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa.pub and $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa. The id_dsa.pub - file is your public key. Copy that file to the target to $HOME/.ssh/machinename.pub and do a "cd .ssh; cat machinename.pub >>authorized_keys". Now you should be able to connect to the target machine via ssh without using passwords. ######################################################### -- use Perl; #powerful programmable prestidigitation