Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while is look into the possibility of using 2 factor authentication, or 2FA, with SSH connections. This would add a much needed level of security to servers I host out in the wild.

Here’s how I did it:

The Google Authenticator mobile app used to be an open source project, it isn’t any more but the project has been kindly forked and looked after by Red Hat under the guise of the FreeOTP project. The first step is to download the app, which is available for Android and iOS there is even a Pebble project in the works. https://fedorahosted.org/freeotp/

A valuable tool I have been using for many years is etckeeper, it works by essentially turning your /etc directory into a git repository.

This is a fantasticly useful set of tools as any configuration changes can be logged and also reverted quite easily. Install and setup is exeptionally easy too!

Packages are available for most distributions, but my scenario (Fedora,CentOS,RHEL) was:

yum install etckeeper

Once the package was installed an initialisation must be performed: