/etc/ssh/ssh_config, /etc/ssh/sshd_config There are no required changes in either of these files. However you may wish to view them to make changes for appropriate security to your system. Configuration information can be found in the man pages for sshd, ssh and ssh-agent Note that you only want to start the sshd server if you want to be able to ssh into your machine. The ssh client doesn't need this script to be used. Having said that, if you want to run the ssh daemon, the OpenSSH daemon init.d script can be created using the following commands: cat > /etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd << "EOF" #!/bin/sh # Begin $rc_base/init.d/sshd # Based on sysklogd script from LFS-3.1 and earlier. # Rewritten by Gerard Beekmans - gerard@linuxfromscratch.org . /etc/sysconfig/rc . $rc_functions case "$1" in start) echo "Starting SSH Server..." loadproc /usr/sbin/sshd ;; stop) echo "Stopping SSH Server..." killproc /usr/sbin/sshd ;; reload) echo "Reloading SSH Server..." reloadproc /usr/sbin/sshd ;; restart) $0 stop sleep 1 $0 start ;; status) statusproc /usr/sbin/sshd ;; *) echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|reload|restart|status}" exit 1 ;; esac # End $rc_base/init.d/sshd EOF chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd Create the symbolic links to this file in the relevant rc.d directories with the following commands: cd /etc/rc.d/init.d && ln -sf ../init.d/sshd ../rc0.d/K30sshd && ln -sf ../init.d/sshd ../rc1.d/K30sshd && ln -sf ../init.d/sshd ../rc2.d/K30sshd && ln -sf ../init.d/sshd ../rc3.d/S30sshd && ln -sf ../init.d/sshd ../rc4.d/S30sshd && ln -sf ../init.d/sshd ../rc5.d/S30sshd && ln -sf ../init.d/sshd ../rc6.d/K30sshd