Help Setup SSH Access to my Web Server

Did you ask your host about it? I think many hosting company change SFTP port number - redirect - because of security reasons.

Ut, good point about the port number, check that,

..but Derek, as to software, I've used Winscp ( installed on Windows ) to open up a file manager-like app ( drag and drop files, change permissions, etc ) or use Putty for a command line app...got to know the url, port number, username ( in the format of your ISP gives you) and a password

Hope that helps

cheers...ty

Putty is what I use too. It's free and does what it says on the tin.

However...

You'll really need to know what you're doing when you log in. All you'll be faced with is an unfriendly command prompt where you need to type Linux commands before anything will happen.

Cheers,

Neil

Hello Derek,
I'm not sure who your hosting provider is, but if you setup SSH at Hostgator for example, you have to submit a support request to enable your access. It is free, even for shared hosting plans. Once that has been setup, you can use putty or WinSCP or SecureCRT or a similar program to connect to your server. In the SSH program, you need to enter your fixed IP address or the domain name (like example.com). The port number is usually 22, but your host might use something else. At Hostgator it is port 2222. Enter your hosting username and password. Select SFTP as your default file protocol. And you should be able to communicate with your server over an encrypted channel.

There are other ways to do this from the command line, but I was just assuming you might be on a Windows box trying to connect to the web server. Let me know if that helps. Thanks.

Derek I wanted to let you know that some hosting providers have an option in their file manager to automatically uncompress ZIP files for you. No need to use any other programs, just upload the entire ZIP file, then select it to uncompress to the folder you specify. From cpanel, I open the file manager, and the option to unzip a file is near the upper right corner of the screen.

Before I figured this out (earlier versions of file manager in cpanel did not have this unzip option) I was uncompressing all of the files locally, then uploading en mass. At that time I did try to experiment with some other helpful PHP scripts that would unzip files for me. But it relied on being able to access the gzip program from your hosting provider.

Rather than unzipping on the server - I've been using Corel FTP Lite to upload big packages to my webserver. Admittedly it is slower than transferring a zip file, but it will just run in the background while you get on with something else.

Also - just to echo the comments about connecting via SSH - you will get a VERY unfriendly, but very powerful interface. You can do some serious damage to your server setup if you are not familiar with command line syntax, so I would avoid that route into a production server unless and until you know what you are doing.

Ok. So what I think you are trying to do is upload and unzip large files.
First thing you need to do is enable ssh access in your CP. It should be an options on some CP's when you setup your account. If not, then contact your host and ask them to enable ssh access.

Next thing you need to do is get your file uploaded correctly. Make sure it is compressed as a .tar.gz and in your correct directory. If you don't know what I am talking about, then download 7Zip (you are using Windoze?) and make a .tar.gz out of your folders.

Upload this via a regular FTP program to the folder where you want it extracted.


Next thing you need to do is

• Install Ubuntu

or

• Download Putty

so you then get into a Terminal in Linux or Putty and type the following
then you input your password

type:
to list the directories
and then
to the directory where your file is. when you are in the directory just type

and it should extract right there.


So if you can do all that and are not too frightend, you can consider doing an install of Ubuntu and improve your efficiency by about %200