introml

Home - GCP - Third party terminal.

Using a Third Party SSH / SCP client to connect to your VM

Finding the SSH Client for You

You can connect to your instance via browser through the instance listing page. Alternatively, you can connect from a third party SSH client. The third party clients may support other features such as integrated SCP and having built-in editors. There are a large number of SSH clients available for Windows and MAC. For Windows machines, there is a very good list, and a similar list for MACs. What you select is a matter of taste.

Setting up SSH keys

The only tricky part of using a third party SSH client is generating and using the SSH keys. There are detailed instructions on the GCP site. But, these are a little confusing. So, I have provided a short summary of the main steps.

First you need to generate a key on your local machine. If you are on Windows, you can do the following with puttygen.exe. Similar programs are available on Mac or linux.

• Download puttygen.exe
• Run puttygen and select “Generate”
• You will be asked to create some randomness. After moving around your mouse, a key will be generated.
• Then fill out the following:
  • In “Key comment”, put your username
  • In “passphrase”, put a password of your choice
• Select “Save public key” and put the file somewhere, say “gcp_key.pub”
• Select “Save private key” and put the file somewhere, say “gcp_key.ppk”
• Keep the puttygen window open On a MAC or Linux machine, you can use the command ssh-keygen from the terminal.

Next, we open the Google Cloud Console. In the Console on your browser, we will apply the key information for all instances in the project.

• Got to Compute Engine -> Metadata
• Select the “SSH Keys” tab
• Select “Edit”
• Select “add item”
• Copy all the text in the puttygen window under the name “Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_key file”. Paste this text into the console window where it says “Enter entire key data”. This will be a long string like

  ssh-rsa AAAAB3N...2eGL86jtvPAtrNpH1KcP+LO+9Wx8RQ== <username>
  

  It begins with ssh-rsa and ends with your username.

• Select save

Finally, you need to provide your SSH or SCP client on your local machine with the gcp_key.ppk file. This will depend on the SSH client.