Clifton - an SSH connection manager

Clifton is used to retrieve SSH certificates for acessing AI Research Resources.

There are two main commands in clifton that you will need, auth and ssh-config.

clifton auth

clifton auth will authenticate with the online portal and download a signed SSH certificate. It will send to the server the fingperint of your local SSH identity file. If you are using a non-standard identity file name, you can specify that file with, e.g.:

clifton auth --identity=~/.ssh/my_key

To authenticate, clifton will both open your default browser and provide a QR code you can scan. You can change which browser opens by setting the BROWSER environment variable.

clifton ssh-config

This will generate the contents of your SSH config file that you can use to connect to the system. By default it will print it to the screen so you can copy it manually into your config file. If you want to write it automatically, call clifton ssh-config write.