Now we have had a little bit of an introduction to our known host.
Each time an SSH client makes a connection through to an SSH server,
the SSH server is going to present the client with the public key.
It's that public key that can be used as a trust
relationship between the client and the server,
so we know we are connecting to the right system.
But we can also centralize our known host's file,
so rather than using it in the client's home directory,
we can put a list of public keys of hosts that you can
connect to inside of the ETC and SSH directory and call the
file something of just known hosts, ssh_known_hosts.
We also might have a little bit of a problem where
we're recycling virtual machines.
If we're constantly testing different virtual machines' setup,
we might find that an IP address that we use is going to be reused many,
many different times.
Each time,
the server will be presenting a different public key
and breaking the trust relationship.
So there are ways that we can do it transcendently from the command line or
more persistently from a configuration file setting us to ignore the public key
and not to persist the storage of the public key,
and we'll see how and why we will use this.
For the moment, though,
we need to make sure that we do fully understand this and
we're able to dive out to our command line.
I always encourage you to make sure that you can follow
through the labs on your own system because this is where your learning is really going to begin.