Access via SSH

TurnKey comes with Webmin pre-installed. It provides a lightweight, user friendly web based Admin UI that makes basic server administration tasks a "point and click" exercise.

That's great for many straight forward, common tasks, but sometimes a terminal session is the quickest and best way to diagnose and fix issues. TurnKey includes OpenSSH server, pre-installed and pre-configured. But to access it, you'll need an SSH client.

OpenSSH Terminal client

Mac OSX and most Linux distros ship with openssh-client as a core tool. Windows does not ship with OpenSSH client included, but it is easy to install.

To use it, open a terminal session and use the 'ssh' command, along with the username and remote IP or domain name (i.e. hostname/FQDN):

ssh USER@REMOTE_HOST

E.g. to log into my TurnKey server with an IP of 192.168.1.111 (as 'root'):

ssh root@192.168.1.111

If you have keys set up, then by default it will attempt to authenticate with keys first. Then it will fallback to password. If you have a range of keys that you use, you can tell ssh to use a specific key with the '-i' switch. E.g.:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/MY_KEY root@192.168.1.111

TurnKey default SSH config is pretty locked down, so if you have numerous keys set up (that SSH tries one after another) then you will likely be unable to log in via password (it will exhaust authentication attempts trying keys, so never gets a chance to fallback to password). You can force a password login using the '-o' switch with the 'PubkeyAuthentication=no' option. I.e.:

ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no root@192.168.1.111

Alternate clients

I'm not aware of any alternate OSX or Linux apps of significance. That's not to say they don't exist, but I'm not aware of them. Windows users have options such as WinSCP or PuTTY (PuTTY is also available for OSX & Linux - but unless you are familiar with it already, IMO it brings no value above the default, native openssh-client).