How to SSH into your Forem Server

If you need to get into your Forem machine to manually tweak something (but I should say you should really be writing Ansible scripts or using some kind of configuration management)

Then this is how you do it.

How do I SSH into my machine?

When you first provision your machine you had to generate a SSH key (a public and private key). They public key was uploaded to your machine so you can then SSH in.

In order to SSH in we need to know the username, and we can find that out by viewing the playbooks/templates/forem.yml.j2

variant: fcos
version: 1.3.0
passwd:
  users:
    - name: core
      ssh_authorized_keys:
        - {{ ssh_key }}

`

So here you can see the username is core.

So to SSH in you need your server's IP address and it will like the following:


ssh core@54.164.103.191


If you want to explicitly specify the path to the SSH private key then you can use the -i flag


ssh core@54.164.103.191 -i /Users/andrewbrown/.ssh/id_rsa.pub


How do I determine my OS version?

If you're looking to install packages it helps to know what version of Fedora you are running. To determine this information, use the following command:


cat /etc/os-release


You will get output as such. So here you can see we are using 34.


NAME=Fedora
VERSION="34.20210626.3.1 (CoreOS)"
ID=fedora
VERSION_ID=34
VERSION_CODENAME=""
PLATFORM_ID="platform:f34"
PRETTY_NAME="Fedora CoreOS 34.20210626.3.1"
ANSI_COLOR="0;38;2;60;110;180"
LOGO=fedora-logo-icon
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:34"
HOME_URL="https://getfedora.org/coreos/"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/"
REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT="Fedora"
REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT_VERSION=34
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="Fedora"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION=34
PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:PrivacyPolicy"
VARIANT="CoreOS"
VARIANT_ID=coreos
OSTREE_VERSION='34.20210626.3.1'
DEFAULT_HOSTNAME=localhost