Why a Distro-Provided OpenSSH is Better than a Third-Party OpenSSH

“When a third-party vendor tells you their custom OpenSSH is
better than your Linux distro’s OpenSSH, here is why you should be
skeptical.

“Recently one of our customers sent us marketing materials from
one of our competitors. One thing that stuck out was the
positioning that their version of a critical system component used
in *NIX OpenSSH is better than the vendor-provided OpenSSH (from
Red Hat, for example). As a former systems engineer responsible for
many *NIX systems, this raises a red flag and here’s why.

“In the last 10 years the SSH (secure shell) protocol has become
the dominant (and sometimes only way) of interacting with *NIX
servers. SSH provides users a secure method of accessing *NIX
resources remotely, replacing rsh or telnet. OpenSSH is a server
and client program that implements the SSH2 protocol and is the de
facto program used on many *NIX flavors (i.e. AIX, FreeBSD, Mac OS
X, Red Hat, SLES, Ubuntu) and it does it very well.”

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