Review of MidpSSH SSH & telnet client for Blackberry and others
One of the things you’ll find is that things tend to go wrong at the worst possible moment… like when you’re not near a computer. MidpSSH lets you establish an SSH session to your server via using your Blackberry or many other models of phones. While it’s not the easiest to use and there are some quirks (like needing to select “type” from the menu before typing commands), but in a pinch it can be a life saver!
Sorry it’s not a better picture… but you get the point. The type is small but even my aged eyes can see it well enough to be useful. I wouldn’t want to use it all day long though.
One of the cool undocumented features is the ability to use an alternate port for SSH to connect to… Like we discussed before, you want to run SSH on another port other than 22. While in most cases security through obscurity isn’t a great idea, changing your ssh port actually cuts the attempts to break in down drastically. It could be that I missed it in the docs, but I didn’t see the ability to use an alternate port. However, it’s easy to do. When you enter the details for a session, on the end of a hostname just add a colon and the port number, so it looks like alpha.mydomain.com:12322 where alpha.mydomain.com is the hostname, and 12322 is the ssh port in this example. Of course, use your real hostname and port number.
And yes it can use key pairs for authentication. It took a little work to get them to the server. In my case I hooked up the blackberry to the pc to get the public key off of it and then put it into the auth file with cut and paste in PuTTY. Once that was done I was able to authenticate with them quite easily.
Remember about your data charges to your wireless provider and don’t go overboard. But this little gem of a program can get you out of a tight situation when nothing else is available. You can find it at: http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/
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About: Robert: Robert Porter holds MCSE, A+, Net+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founder of Lagniappe Internet L.L.C., a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration. |
September 27th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
How did you access the public key MidpSSH generates from your PC?
September 28th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Ah that one took a little bit to find as well… Take a look here: http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/wiki/public-key
The trick is you need to be able to login somewhere with a password first. I just created a regular user and gave them ssh with password access at first. Opened a terminal session using the password, then from their home directory I typed vi bb.pub – hit the letter ‘i’ for insert, and then from the menu selected type Special, Output and had it send the key. Then menu and ESC to get out of edit mode. And finally “:wq!” to write the file out. You should then have a find bb.pub containing your key… You can then cd into the .ssh directory and cat >> authorized_keys (or …keys2 depending on your setup) .. but note the TWO greater than signs – thats tells it to append it to the end of the file and not overwrite the file.