Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m off on another tangent away from my main goal of Kitty-Cam security. Let’s get started!
Last week, I went over the basics of logging in securely without a password. This week, I tried practicing my skills and setting up a SSH key pair. Somewhere, I messed up royally, and I messed up the connection for the laptop as well.
It feels like my knowledge in computers is growing like a pile of sand, with the goal being to reach some arbitrary height. Each grain of sand higher means another shell of grains around the outside, and if one falls in just the wrong place, I have to learn how to fix it. For monolithic goals, this is bad news, but in a wider scope, it’s not so bad. If I set a new goal in a similar field, a lot of my grains of knowledge will still be applicable to this new task. I suppose that’s why they call it a learning curve, though right now, it feels like a learning slope.
I went into the workshop and spent a while banging into a learning wall. My progress from last week had seemingly broken, and I could not recognize how for the longest time, even until closing time. Apparently, in addition to SSH public and private keys, there’s this thing called a host key. From a little more research, it looks like a host key is a number you trade over a separate communication line to make sure you don’t have a man-in-the-middle attack where someone is passing all the traffic between you and the server and taking notes on your otherwise private conversation.
I still haven’t gotten my side project working, but now, I think I know the correct direction. I’d like to get this working, because an interesting robot platform I’ve been following for a number of years, Sweetie Bot Project, finally made their code open source. With any luck, I’ll have my skills refined to where I can build one when they release the hardware as well.
Final Question: What projects have you looked forward to working on?