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Comment by fletchowns | Hacker News Reader

How about: Why it doesn't matter what port you run SSH on

* Because anything but the IP address of your office or VPN connection should be blocked at the firewall level for that port

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Why would I use a VPN when I have SSH? IE, why do you think that a VPN is somehow more secure than an SSH connection?

VPN is not mutually exclusive with using SSH. What he's saying is that people should firewall their SSH ports to only allow access from trusted IPs, and VPN's make that easier to do.

So that means you can't SSH into your remote machine from an arbitrary connection? What do you do when you're traveling?

You use a VPN and then connect to SSH

So then we go back to my original question. Why do you think a VPN is more secure than SSH?

IE, Why is it important that your SSH port only be connected to by known IPs, but your VPN port is OK to be connected to from anywhere?

It's not really about one being more secure than the other. They are both very secure. It's just good to have multiple layers of protection in case something goes wrong somewhere, whether it's caused by human error or something else.

VPN into it?

Yes, in a sense those things are mutually exclusive.

You can get in a network by VPN or SSH. Yes, after that you can also log into a computer by SSH, but the question remains - why access the network by VPN instead of SSH?

I'm with you on that one. Setting up OpenVPN is a day worth of work at most and gives you the freedom not to have to worry about this stuff in the future.

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