Access via SSH

TurnKey comes with Webmin pre-installed and accessable via HTTPS on port 12321. 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, Windows 10/11 (from Win10 build 1803 onwards) and most Linux distros ship with OpenSSH as a core CLI tool.

To use the OpenSSH client, 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 /path/to/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

In more recent versions of TurnKey, fail2ban is installed as well. That means that if SSH login fails, then you will be locked out of your server for a period of time - 10 minutes by default.

Alternate clients

I'm not aware of any alternate OSX or Linux apps of significance. PuTTY is a popular SSH GUI, available for OSX, Linux and Windows. But IMO at least on OSX and Linux, unless you are familiar with it already - it brings little value above the native CLI OpenSSH client. A popular Windows GUI app is WinSCP. As well as proving an SSH client, it also provides a UI for uploading/downloading files (via SCP).