One of the biggest 'ah-ha' moments I had with SSH was that I could create my own hosts with certain properties. For example, if I wanted a backup server with a

One of the biggest 'ah-ha' moments I had with SSH was that I could create my own hosts with certain properties. For example, if I wanted a backup server with a special user and key I could add it to my ~/.ssh/config file Host backup-server HostName backup.example.com User backup IdentityFile ~/.ssh/backup_dsa Then just have a shell script run $ ssh backup-server It ended up working really well. Also, control sockets.