Simon Fredsted

Here's a little time-saving tip for Mac OS X/Linux users: if you work with lots of different Macs and servers daily, store your SSH configuration file in dropbox, and create a symbolic link to it so you can sync it across your computers.

With this, once I add a new machine to my SSH config, it's immediately available across all of my computers, my workstation, laptop, work machine, etc. I'm terrible at remembering hostnames and IP-addresses, so this comes in handy as I acquire control over more and more servers.

Also, you can of course extend this method to sync other types of configuration files, like your git config or bash profile. Dropbox is a neat tool!

Step 1

Create a folder in your Dropbox to store files like these.

mkdir ~/Dropbox/configs

Step 2

Move your ssh config to this folder. I just call it ssh-config.txt instead of simply config for easier access and as to not mix it up with other configuration files.

mv ~/.ssh/config ~/Dropbox/configs/ssh-config.txt

Step 3

Create a symbolic link to the new configuration file.

ln -s ~/Dropbox/configs/ssh-config.txt ~/.ssh/config

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2013 at 21:51 and is filed under Articles. Tags: dropbox, ssh, technology You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.