# Connecting to a Access Anywhere Node using SSH
#### Last updated on: October ZZ, 2021

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This page is primarily intended for Linux system administrators.
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An Access Anywhere instance consists of one or more Access Anywhere nodes, each of which is a Linux virtual machine.  While day-to-day administration of Access Anywhere is through a web-based interface, IT administrators will occasionally need to access these nodes through the Linux command line or shell. While some hosting providers allow access to the Linux shell through the virtual machine's console it's more common to access these nodes from your local computer over a secure protocol (SSH) using an SSH Client such as "ssh".

## Prerequisites

 * **SSH Client** - Most operating systems include an SSH Client called "ssh". It can be found on Linux or Mac and later versions of Windows 10 (or above). For Windows, Putty is also a popular SSH client.
 * **Network Access** - You will need network access to port 22 on each machine. 
 * **Credentials** - For most tasks you will need the passwords for both "smeconfiguser" and "root".  For some cloud deployments ([[https://docs.storagemadeeasy.com/aws-gettingstarted#ssh/access|AWS]], [[https://docs.storagemadeeasy.com/azure-gettingstarted?rev=1635531193#ssh/access|Azure]]), you will use an SSH Key Pair for smeconfiguser and will not require a separate root password.

## Log in using passwords

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For security, only the user "smeconfiguser" can connect remotely.
Once you have logged into the node as smeconfiguser you can change to another user.
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Log in as smeconfiguser using the ssh application from your desktop terminal or command line where "XXXXXXXX" is the domain name or IP address of Access Anywhere node.

    $ ssh smeconfiguser@XXXXXXXX
    smeconfiguser@XXXXXXXX's password: 
    Last login: Thu Oct 28 09:44:52 2021 from <client_ip_address>
    [smeconfiguser@appliance ~]$ 

You can then log in as root:

    [smeconfiguser@XXXXXXXX ~]$ su -
    Password: 
    Last login: Thu Oct 28 14:09:18 UTC 2021 on pts/0
    There was 1 failed login attempt since the last successful login.
    root@XXXXXXXX:~ # 
## Log in using SSH key pairs

Log in to the appliance using the SSH Key Pair you created with or associated with the instance.

    ssh -i "AccessAnywhere.pem" smeconfiguser@XXXXXX

Elevate to the root user (no password required).  Become root

    sudo su -