Monday, January 10, 2011

Setup SSH Server with freeSSHD

Last week I was able to ssh tunnel back to Singapore to watch Singapore TV shows at Xin MSN. I decided to create my own for no obvious reason... yet. I was planning to setup using cygwin, but I found a simplier way, using freesshd. Installation was straightforward.

As for SSH client, I'm using puTTY Tray, a modified version of putty with system tray icon when minized the console windows. The setup took less than 15min to complete. There are 2 known problems with freesshd, depends on luck really. If you setup to start freesshd as system service, it will not create system tray icon where you can edit the settings such as add new user. The problems are:

1.) "The specified address is already in use" after clicked OK at freesshd settings. The solution is to stop the freesshd system service. Personally, i'd removed the service, and create a shortcut in startup folder to auto start it as it will give me the system tray icon.

2.) I got 2 test environment, 1 on my laptop and 1 on my HTPC. Then 1 on laptop works fine without any hurdle. On HTPC, I've setup an user with authorization method as Password Stored as SHA1 hash. When I try to connect to my SSH server on HTPC using putty, it prompted Access Denied with the correct username and password. I'd been googling but found no direct answer to the problem. Then I tried the following: at Authentication tab of freesshd, set password authentication as Required, then Public key authentication as Disabled. With no hope of solving it, I got it working, no more Access Denied!