SSH'ing into my old laptop and working has become an integral part of my workflow. All my code is hosted on this remote machine that I SSH into and I've been using VS Code's Remote - SSH extension to access the code and work on it.

Given how my Macbook running Ubuntu has space restrictions (it's a 2017 Macbook air with 128gb SSD), hosting code of multiple projects on a more spacious machine with decent computing power is a must have for me.

While it is a good thing I've got passwordless SSH authentication in place, I also felt the need to disable password based authentication for additional security.

Disabling SSH password based authentication

After ensuring I can securely SSH into my remote machine, I've followed these steps to disable password based authentication.

I opened the SSH configuration file at → sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

Unmodified, the file should have these entries

I've Modified the #PasswordAuthentication yes to PasswordAuthentication no. And I made sure I removed the # so that the line is uncommented.

The entries now look like this:

Once done, I restarted the SSH service by running → sudo systemctl restart ssh