In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenSSH on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. 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 of OpenSSH on an Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04.
- 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, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install OpenSSH on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Installing OpenSSH on Ubuntu 16.04.
Install it by running the following command in your terminal:
apt-get install openssh-server
Furthermore, you can install the OpenSSH client application using the following command:
apt-get install openssh-client
After that, you should have SSH service enabled in your system:
systemctl start sshd.service systemctl enable sshd.service
The last step is to open up the ssh firewall port:
ufw allow ssh ufw reload
Step 3. Advanced Configuration OpenSSH.
Now sometimes 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 2022:
Port 2022
Save the file and close it. Then restart the service for the changes to take effect:
systemctl restart sshd.service
Congratulations! You have successfully installed OpenSSH. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing OpenSSH on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official OpenSSH website.
