In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable SSH on Debian 10 Buster. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenSSH (OpenBSD Secure Shell) is a connectivity tool that enables remote login via the SSH protocol, hence eliminating eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. It helps to secure all network communications by encrypting all network traffic over multiple authentication methods through a secured tunnel.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation to enable SSH on a Debian 10 (Buster) server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Enable SSH on Debian 10 Buster
Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:
apt update apt upgrade
Step 2. Enable SSH on Debian 10.
You will need to install OpenSSH-Server (OpenBSD Secure Shell) which is available in Debian universal repository:
sudo apt install openssh-server
After that, you should have SSH service enabled in your system:
systemctl start sshd.service systemctl enable sshd.service
Step 3. Advanced Configuration SSH Server.
Now sometime we may want to change some settings (for example, the port, and root login permission) . This can be done by editing the configuration file via command:
nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
The first thing you may want to do is to change the default SSH listening port. Open the file and locate the line that specifies the listening port:
Port 22
Change it to something else. For example, to 330:
Port 330
Save the file and close it. Then restart the service for the changes to take effect:
sudo systemctl restart sshd.service
Congratulations! You have successfully installed OpenSSH. Thanks for using this tutorial to enable openSSH on Debian 10 Buster server. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official SSH website.
