ssh it’s oh so quiet
Ok, we discovered a long time ago that Telnet and FTP happily broadcast your username/password combo in plain text. So then we started using Secure shell (SSH) and Secure copy (SCP). Obviously with these being Linux based technologies there are Windows utilities such as WinSCP.
Everything is great and all are happy. However, it doesn’t stop there…
The clever bods who wrote SSH allow you to pass command line parameters to the remote system that will get executed and the output returned to your local system. Here’s an example:
ssh me@example.com ‘ls’
This will run the ls (list files) command on the remote system and return you the result, though not before prompting you for a password. So, to make the experience even smoother you can perform some magic by swapping digital keys to remove the dependency on passwords. I’ve used the following Web page a bunch of times to set up SSH login without password.
Enjoy this post and the sunny weather 
May 28th, 2009 at 15:03
SSH is great, but it is considered bad practice to not have a passphrase set for your keys… plenty of people explaining why – here’s one example. http://www.snailbook.com/faq/no-passphrase.auto.html. Much better to specify a passphrase and use an agent to manage them.