In this tutorial, we will show you how to replacing OpenSSH with Dropbear on CentOS. For those of you who didn’t know, Dropbear is a relatively small SSH server and client. It runs on a variety of POSIX-based platforms. Dropbear is open source software, distributed under an MIT-style license. Dropbear is particularly useful for “embedded”-type Linux (or other Unix) systems, such as wireless routers.
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 through the step by step replacing Dropbear SSH in CentOS server.
Replacing OpenSSH With Dropbear on CentOS
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
sudo yum clean all sudo yum update
Step 2. Replacing OpenSSH With Dropbear on CentOS system.
To install, first, you must add the yum repository information corresponding to your CentOS/RHEL version to yum:
- For CentOS 6.x use:
#wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/dropbear-0.58-1.el6.i686.rpm #rpm -Uvh dropbear-0.58-1.el6.i686.rpm
- For CentOS 5.x use:
#wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/dropbear-0.55-1.el5.i386.rpm #rpm -Uvh dropbear-0.55-1.el5.i386.rpm
First, we will just install dropbear using yum:
#yum install dropbear
Now we just need to start up a new SSH server:
nano /etc/init.d/dropbear
Edit port dropbear:
OPTIONS=" -p 222"
Add dropbear to startup and start the server:
chkconfig dropbear on service dropbear start
Next, you can stop the current OpenSSH server:
yum remove openssh-server
Note: Make sure you check that it is indeed running and verify from another box before you logout your current session otherwise.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Dropbear. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Dropbear SSH in CentOS system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Dropbear web site.