Question

Difference between ssh and sshd

I’m trying to secure my environment to possible intruders and i’m wondering what is the difference between ssh and sshd. I’ve already disabled clear text passwords and i’d like to know if i can turn off sshd? Or will that stop me from logging in myself. Thanks.


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Accepted Answer

@ariziragoran

The client is ssh, the daemon is sshd.

If you disable sshd, you won’t be able to login remotely, so you’d effectively be locked out of the server. You’re only means of logging in at that point would be via console, though console doesn’t accept SSH Keys – only passwords, so you’d essentially lock yourself out of console as well.

sshd is what listens for an incoming connection – i.e. when you attempt to connect via SSH from your local PC/Mac/Laptop/etc.

If you disable ssh, you won’t be able to use SSH to connect to other machines (such as in the event you need to copy files from one server to another).

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Featured on Community

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more