SSH Initial setup, New Install

Hi,
I am posting this as i believe it should be covered and i was unable to find any ultimately useful information from a novices perspective.

First off, thanks this is awesome im blown away so thanks.

The Problem:

-New user installs and wants to download and trust root CA to commence journey

  • The guide tells user to enter commands in a terminal, user searches and finds start9 does not have a terminal nor can tty`s be accessed. Start9 | Trusting Your Root CA on Linux
    -So user goes to the next menu entry which counter intuitively is SSH keys for ssh access, and the documentation advises that in order to generate a key they must open a terminal… Start9 | Using SSH

I love and share the founders vision and i am blown away by the execution, and so while i am sure many of us including myself have sufficient tech skills that enough bashing around i will eventually solve this. Having some clear instructions here would be great and i dont feel i am sufficiently knowledgable to provide a clear concise solution, so do i have any takers? once a clear solution is made it is my hope to edit the post removing all the discussion elements so a simple Question Answer format is created under a suitably named and searchable forum topic.

The way i solved the problem was to follow this guide Start9 | Using SSH on another system

Perhaps that is what is what is intended by the guide, and if so does any one know how i can propose amending the documentation to make this clearer?

step 1 of “Creating a SSH Key” currently reads “Open a terminal and enter the following command:”
For clarity it should read "Open a terminal (on a separate system) and enter the following command:

Hi ExoNos… I was about to thank you for the clarity and detail of your original question, but then disappoint you in still being a little confused by what you’re asking.

You see, the only way you could work out that your server doesn’t provide access to any kind of terminal/command line interface is if you are using it incorrectly. You should not be sitting in front of the server with a keyboard, monitor and mouse plugged into it. It’s a server, not a client device. Everything that’s in those guides should be performed on your regular client device, with your server off happily sitting headless alongside your router somewhere.

At no point should you be interacting directly with the server for these guides. Whether it is trusting the CA or setting up SSH, these guides are for configuring the regular client device(s) you use to be able to access your server as a client.

Hi Stu,
Thanks for your response, and you are absolutely right (in a way haha)
While i was in fact on my laptop, logged into the server via https, my perspective was that i was on the server, (the documentation is linked via the server user interface) so i interpreted the information in the context of being ‘on the server’ as opposed to being ‘on the laptop’.

While i understand and can see, (now that i know) that all the documentation is written from the perspective of being physically on a separate device, as a new user reading the documentation this was not clear.

I originally was confused by what appeared to be an unsolvable loop, (other than physical access, boot disk, manually editing) once i realized the documentation was intended to be run on another system, i thought that proposing an amendment to make this clear would be useful in:

A. keeping with the projects stated goals
B. Assisting future users that also had the incorrect perspective when reading the documentation.

Thanks for this detailed and thoughtful explanation, I better understand where you’re coming from. I’ll take it into account as we work on the latest version of the docs.