Accessing the EGSE Host via SSH

Goal

The goal of this tutorial is access EGSE Host using SSH connection.

A bit of background

You access EGSE Host using SSH connection. After connecting, you will be able to control your Board. Customer authenticates using public key authentication - built in feature in SSH that provides secure passwordless login without need to share any sensitive data. This authentication flow requires generation of key pair, uploading public key via User panel and using private key to authenticate.

This kind of access is popular with Git hosting services like GitHub or GitLab.

Prerequisites

  • Active subscription within Smart Mission Lab system

  • OpenVPN installed on your computer

    • For Linux: typically installed out-of-box

    • For Windows: OpenSSH is an optional feature

Generation of SSH key pair

Note

If you already have SSH key pair generated, you can skip this step.

  1. Use ssh-keygen to generate key file. Accept default values by pressing Enter. Note that setting passphrase is optional (if you set passphrase, you will be asked for it every time key is used).

    user@local-machine:~$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_ed25519):
Created directory '/home/user/.ssh'.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_ed25519
Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:t5m75rzyyadx3NjNSc9Tm+t5tafOM5En+Z6qo0lcwNU user@local-machine
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ED25519 256]--+
|           ..    |
|        . .  E   |
|         o       |
|          .      |
|        S ..   +.|
|        ...= +*+O|
|         o= + oXB|
|        ooo*..o.O|
|         B%*oo*X+|
+----[SHA256]-----+

Upload SSH public key to Smart Mission Lab

  1. Copy contents of /home/user/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub file. This is your public key.

  2. Login to Smart Mission Lab’s User Panel and navigate to SSH Keys section.

  3. Click Add SSH Key and fill the form

    • Title - descriptive name of public key

    • Key - paste contents of public key file

    Adding SSH key in User Panel

  4. Click Save to add new public key.

Note

You can add many different public keys to your account. This is useful when you have multiple devices that you want to access.

Connect to EGSE Host using SSH

  1. Login to Smart Mission Lab’s User Panel and navigate to Subscriptions section.

  2. Note the name in DNS - should be similar to egse-<something>.egse.vpn.sml.kplabs.space.

  3. Use ssh command to connect to EGSE Host:

    user@local-machine:~$ ssh customer@egse-<something>.egse.vpn.sml.kplabs.space.
Warning: Permanently added 'egse-753gf3hhrkivm.egse.vpn.sml.kplabs.space' (ED25519) to the list of known hosts.
Welcome to Ubuntu 23.04 (GNU/Linux 6.8.0-47-generic x86_64)
  _____   _  _      _
 / ___/  / \/ |    / /
 \__ \  /     |   / /
 __/ / / /|/| |  / /__
/___/ /_/   |_| /____/

SMART MISSION LAB
    by KP Labs

Board: Antelope
Run sml --help to see available commands
Visit https://docs.sml.kplabs.space for documentation
Visit https://sml.kplabs.space to manage your subscriptions
Visit https://grafana.vpn.sml.kplabs.space to see telemetry readouts from your boards
customer@egse-<something>:~$