Joining OurShack

Contents

Paying for OurShack

Please set up a Standing Order with your bank. They will have a form, or they might accept a letter. Contact Andy Wardley (abw -at- ourshack dot com) for account details to put in it.

Setting Up an OurShack Account

These are instructions (mainly for Microsoft Windows users) on how to set up a new account at OurShack. This is a little complex because we only permit access via ssh with RSA key authentication.

  1. Cross our palm with Silver. See Paying for OurShack
  2. Choose an account name. We've used "yourname" in these examples.
  3. Start thinking of a good passphrase. Good passphrases are 15-30 characters long and are not simple sentences or otherwise easily guessable (English prose has only 1-2 bits of entropy per word, and provides very bad passphrases).
  4. Start thinking of a good password.
  5. Phone Andrew Beattie on 0777 166 1653 or mail him at gaffer-at-ourshack.com and leave him your phone number so that we can agree an account name and password without sending this info over the net in cleartext.
  6. Andrew will set up your account: 
    $ sudo /usr/sbin/adduser -d /usr/home/yourname -c "Your Full Name" yourname

Setting up an SSH client

You have a choice here: openssh, PuTTY, TeraTerm, or some other SSH client In all cases, you will need to

Using the OpenSSH client

Most Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD systems will have ssh already installed.

If you already have a public/private key pair, just send us a copy of the public bit - usually .ssh/id_dsa.pub or .ssh/identity.pub

If this is the first time you have had a use for SSH keys, you need to generate a pair: 

	ssh-keygen -t ed25519

This will ask you to supply a passphrase to encrypt the secret key. Remember this and do not give it to anyone. You only ever need to type it on your own machine, and it never comes to Ourshack.

Once you have generated the key pair, send us the public part as above.

Using the PuTTY client

(A bit sketchy - feel free to expand on this)

  1. Fetch PuTTY from it's distribution site. It is probably easiest to use the zip or installer files if you are using Windows.
  2. Install PuTTY by unpacking the zip file or running the installer.
  3. Run PuTTYGen to make a key
  4. Use cut-n-paste to copy the text representation of the public key into a mail message. Send it to gaffer -at- ourshack.com who will install it for you.
  5. Configure PuTTY to connect to sow.ourshack.com and try it out.

NOTE: anti-spam measures: replace "-at-" with "@" in all email addresses.