Silk Web Hosting: Logging in and uploading files

Modified

You can get command-line access to your silk account using SSH, or upload/download files to silk with SFTP or SCP. Connect with the host w3.uvm.edu or silk.uvm.edu, using your NetID username and password.

Command-line access

Open a command prompt window. On a Mac, you can use Terminal, available from the Finder in /Applications/Utilities. In Windows, you can type PowerShell from the search bar.

~$ ssh <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu
<mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu's password:
[<mynetid>@silk31 ~]$

Other clients for Windows

On an older computer that does not include OpenSSH, you will need an application that can communicate via SSH, such as PuTTY or SmarTTY. A copy of PuTTY preconfigured for some common UVM systems is available from the UVM Software Download Archive.

From your SSH application, open a connection to the host w3.uvm.edu. When prompted, type your NetID username and password.

Uploading/downloading files

You will need an application that can communicate via SFTP or SCP.

Drag & drop applications

Any of the following will work:

Open a connection to the host w3.uvm.edu using a connection type of SFTP or SCP (but not FTP). When prompted, type your NetID username and password.

Rsync (macOS or Linux)

Recursively copy the contents of a directory to your site:

~$ rsync -avz /my/directory/ <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu:www-root/
sending incremental file list
./
file1
file2

sent 1,220 bytes  received 57 bytes  364.86 bytes/sec
total size is 1,049,600  speedup is 821.93

SFTP

Interactively upload and download files.

~$ sftp <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu
Connected to w3.uvm.edu.
sftp> cd www-root
sftp> put index.html
Uploading index.html to /users/m/y/<mynetid>/www-root/index.html
index.html                                             100% 1597     1.6KB/s   00:00

SCP

Copy files or directories.

~$ scp index.html <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu:www-root/
<mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu's password:
index.html                                             100% 1597     1.6KB/s   00:00

Using SSH keys instead of a password

For frequent logins, it might be more convenient to configure your site for authentication using public key cryptography rather than typing your password for each login. For this, you need to create an authentication key and tell your account that it is permitted access.

On the computer you will be connecting from, if you do not already have a key in in the ~/.ssh/ directory (or %USERPROFILE%\.ssh directory for Windows), you can create one by typing ssh-keygen. By default, this will create files named /.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (or %USERPROFILE\.ssh\id_ed25519 and %USERPROFILE\.ssh\id_es25519.pub for Windows).

Configure your silk account to allow access by uploading your public key. The easiest way to do this is with ssh-copy-id <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu. If your key is named something other than the default, you will need to tell it which to use, such as ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/mykey.pub <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu.

Windows does not include an ssh-copy-id command, but you can do the equivalent by typing:

ssh <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu "mkdir -p ~/.ssh; chmod 700 ~/.ssh"
type %USERPROFILE%\.ssh\id_ed25519.pub | ssh <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu "cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

When you log in, your key will be used instead of prompting you for a password. If your key is named something other than the default or you use Windows, you add the path to your key to your login command:

ssh <mynetid>@w3.uvm.edu -i %USERPROFILE%\.ssh\id_ed25519.pub

Other clients for Windows

PuTTY users can follow the directions in its documentation for Using public keys for SSH authentication, to create an authentication key and grant it access to your site.

SmarTTY users can follow the directions for Configuring SSH public key authentication to have the application create and set up your key for you, or to perform the equivalent steps manually.

Allowing others to log in to your account

Multiple people might need the ability to publish to a site. Instead of sharing the account password, you can grant login access with SSH keys. Each person can create a key and send the account owner their public key (usually a file ending in .pub). You can then authorize these keys by adding them to the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in the shared silk account. An SSH public key will look similar to the following, all on one line:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQC4SUrgibkGPPL9d8z1aixpe784/BLA4
9Ui+LoMCG1KBe8h5xbtElZP553DyxUci1G1Lu17mDruxRoUGDD8iOG7f4QMyCnnXU0zHL
3drV8PzR3iPo9BzITpuJWvKquNTSuDZOCJIdsaQwcn6KeJuV1IG69t2zHZVB+Q6QHvjDL
p7vEam83yAmAdw/Js/04oF5V6KA1TojcX5Nzl0lB0kWJC/rZW2+kc2tspjcP/2J3D2k/B
NhAToAFk2amIBH6NI9BNAirqWnI0hsan6gMvey3y3kDmIRrKflTBvoIVQX2nio3Nxq8P6
J6iZCom/AGQtJ4Soutwp0R5c4yxSPvq+aFz <mynetid>@uvm.edu

Be aware that when people log into your account using an SSH key, they will be logging in as you, and can do anything with the account that you could do.

When shared access is no longer needed, make sure to remove the SSH key from your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.