The installation went smoothly and seems to have the sole side effect of creating a folder with a few files among which is the executable application. SSH has several ways of authenticating the client, but I will speak of only the public key scheme.
Upon first launching the SSH application one creates a SSH key pair which
is stored in a passphrase protected binary file in the SSH application folder.
To do this go to
Edit > Connection Properties ... > RSA Identity > New ...
In that dialog box they want a “comment” which their app
uses to discriminate among the several key pairs that you may come to use.
I will call it the “key name” here.
You get to name the binary file that holds the key pair.
The file seems to hold nothing but the key name and private key,
from which the public key may be derived.
It is scrambled with your pass phrase as well.
To use the key pair the user transports the private key to the
client machine, perhaps where it was generated, and the public key to the
server machine which we will assume here is a Unix host.
To get the public key go to:
Edit > Connection Properties ... > RSA Identity > Select ...
and navigate to the key pair file created above.
The hierarchical file name will then appear in the “RSA Identity File”
field and the “Copy” button will be available, hopefully.
Sometimes it is available and sometimes not. I have sent e-mail
to support but not gotten a response yet.
The Copy button copies an ascii form of the public key and its name onto the Mac clipboard. There are spaces but no “new lines” there. The instructions provided by their intsallation guide don't work for me because the line is too long. I put the line in a BBEdit file and used Fetch to move the file to Unix. On the Unix server machine there must be a file $HOME/.ssh./authorized_keys which is such public key values, each terminated by a new line.
You use whatever pre SSH authority you have to introduce that file into your file space. ($HOME is your user name there.)
In the
Edit > Connection Properties ... > RSA Identity
window the OK button assigns the selected key pair as your
RSA Identity and uses that implicitly for other commands.
It will require your passphrase each time to unscramble the key pair
from the file.
The same file may be copied, bit for bit, to your .ssh Unix directory and called
“identity” and this lets you use that Unix machine as an SHH client
via which to access other SSH servers with the Unix “ssh” shell command.
You can save subsequent work by “saving settings” after navigating to your
private key file on the Mac. Go to
File > Save Settings As ...
Other settings such as terminal preferences are saved as well.
Connecting: Having identified your private key to the Mac SSH application, you must select or create (with File > New Window) an unconnected SSH window and then use [File > Connect ...] to make a new connection. If the option to select RSA is greyed out it is probably because you have not identified your private key to the Mac SSH app. The client behaves poorly if you try to connect before there is IP service. The Mac SSH client can connect several windows at once to the same or different hosts.