On: macOS command-line tools you might not know about

[wincy]

I love this tool too!

except one time I quickly typed

`cat ~/.ssh/mykey | pbcopy`

And sent it straight away to my coworker on Slack.

I then spent the rest of the day making a new private key and adding my new pubkey to all of the 1000+ servers I had root access to. I mean we had tools to help but it still wasn’t fun.

With great power/convenience comes the potential to do dumb things at lightning speeds!

[vinay_ys → wincy]

If you literally have ssh root access to 1000+ servers, using certificates will be more secure and convenient than directly using public key.

[xrisk → wincy]

put your private key in something like Secretive: https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive

[gunapologist99 → wincy]

Userify would have made that pretty painless (all it really seems to do is update the authorized_keys across all of your servers every minute or so)

[superq → gunapologist99]

also userify allows you to set up sudo access on some of the servers and not others, so that'd take care of the other root-access issue you have. (sudo also provides auditing/logging controls that are useful in a multi-user environment)

[oxygen_crisis → wincy]

I might start naming my private key files ~/.ssh/keyname.PRIVATE after hearing that story...

[plorkyeran → oxygen_crisis]

That's not a bad idea. I've never actually made the same mistake, but I have caught it at the last moment and having tab complete not pick the private one first would help.

[wincy → oxygen_crisis]

It would have avoided it! I was using tab and forgot to select .pub as you correctly surmised. I was a junior dev at the time and all the seniors got a good laugh out of it, and I use it as a cautionary tale about trying to be TOO overeager and efficient.