SSH, or secure shell, is the most common way of connecting to Linux hosts for remote administration. Although the basics of connecting to a single host are often rather straight forward, this can become unwieldy and a much more complicated task when you begin working with a large number of remote systems.

Fortunately, OpenSSH allows you to provide customized client-side connection options. These can be saved to a configuration file that can be used to define per-host values. This can help keep the different connection options you use for each host separated and organized, and can keep you from having to provide extensive options on the command line whenever you need to connect.

In this guide, we'll cover the basics of the SSH client configuration file, and go over some common options.