Your shell account is your identity and membership on ~horse — username and password credentials carry across most services. Once you're in, you have access to mail, XMPP, IRC via soju, git hosting, and secure temporary file sharing. Not yet a ~horsie? Sign up.

Authentication

Shell access requires an SSH key — password authentication over SSH is disabled. Submit your public key during signup, or petition ky to add it after the fact.

You are still required to set a password with passwd after your first login. Services that authenticate via PAM (mail, XMPP, Git, and others) will use your shell password. All services tied to PAM credentials are marked on the home page.

Generating a Key

If you don't have an SSH key yet, generate one with an SSH client or shell via the ssh-keygen command:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519

This creates two files in ~/.ssh/: id_ed25519 (private — keep this secret) and id_ed25519.pub (public — this is what you submit during signup). If your client requires RSA, use -t rsa -b 4096 instead.

Access

The shell is reachable over multiple networks. All use port 22.

Connecting over Tor or I2P

Tor — torsocks

torsocks wraps any TCP application to route it through Tor. With Tor running locally:

torsocks ssh username@horse6wso4zzwbczt5x3nl5uxr7a3z7cpkooint6myrk7mvhynamquqd.onion

I2P

With proxychains-ng, configure it to use I2P's built-in SOCKS5 proxy (default 127.0.0.1:4447):

proxychains ssh username@horse64cl3qmul5ozcopmhtash6x4pgajwj3v5xg7qhoaua7fcbq.b32.i2p

Alternatively, create a Standard client tunnel in the I2P tunnel manager pointing to horse64cl3qmul5ozcopmhtash6x4pgajwj3v5xg7qhoaua7fcbq.b32.i2p on port 22, with a local port of your choice (e.g. 2222). Then connect to that local port directly:

ssh -p 2222 username@127.0.0.1

Clients

Linux, macOS, and Windows all ship with OpenSSH — open a terminal and use ssh directly. On mobile, iSH (iOS) provides a local shell with OpenSSH, Termux (Android) does the same, and Termius is a dedicated SSH client available on both platforms.

Host Key Fingerprints

Verify these match when connecting for the first time.