Question : SSH

I have SSH Installed on my Linux RedHat box.  I "punched" a hole in my firewall to allow traffic to go to that Linux server, port 22.

From any PC with an internet connection I can telnet to the firewalls public IP address on port 22.  I get the prompt :

SSH-1.99-OpenSSH_2.9p2

What do I do next to be able to get to a linux prompt and how secure is this.  ?

Answer : SSH

A) Don't use telnet, you need an ssh client (that effectively replace telnet) for this. If your client platform is windows you can either get the cygwin port of ssh from http://www.cygwin.com or (and this is much simpler) get PuTTY from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ (Don't worry about it being version 0.54, it's very stable:-).

B) Pretty secure, but since you "reveal" your linux boxs sshd server you need keep _at least_ that very up to date. Since you mention this being a "RedHat"... You do know that all versions of the freeware release RedHat Linux up to and including version 9 has been desupported by RedHat? If this box is of that flavour, I'd recommend against it, on the grounds that sooner or later there will be some flaw discovered in the version of ssh you have installed. If you want to do this, and you have RH9 or ealrlier, switch to some other linux distro that still enjoy support/errata/bugfixes. An easy trabnsition should be the Fedora project (http://fedora.redhat.com) or Mandrakelinux (http://www.mandrakelinux.com)... Or the RHEL reimplementation Whiteboxlinux (http://www.whiteboxlinux.com).

-- Glenn