The Apple and the Tunnel

Its an irritating inconvenience when you have to ssh into seven different servers constantly to do things. Add to that host names longer than Vaas’s birth name and a bunch of option flags, you pretty much have to resort to a bookmarked page and keyboard shortcuts to make life marginally better. Or so I thought.

After a few of days of snail paced tunneling into different production servers I was drained. There had to be a better way. And I was willing to find it. Whatever it takes, I told myself. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and opened Google Chrome, marking the beginning of an epic quest to find answers. My hands wondered over my weapon of choice: The keyboard. “SSH alias” was typed into the search engine. I pressed the return key. Google set to work while I held by breath.

483,000 results retrieved in 0.59 seconds. I smiled. Internet was fast today. Without wasting time, I scanned through. Stackoverflow, askubuntu, stackexchange. The usual suspects. And a few unusual ones. I quickly set to work, opening multiple links in different tabs, certain at least one of them held answers to t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶r̶e̶t̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶u̶n̶i̶v̶e̶r̶s̶e̶ my ssh woes.

There are many beautiful things in this world. ‘Discovery’ is definitely one of them. For better or for worse, it changes the world as we see it. Sir Isaac Newton saw a falling apple while thinking of forces and discovered gravity. I on a gloomy Sunday, while looking on stackoverflow, discovered the SSH config file. The former, changed the world. The latter, changed mine.