# Connecting to a remote (headless) miner

Connecting to a remote explorer should be as simple as putting your miners url in the built in Remote Miner plugin. However if that remote explorer isnt running on your localhost machine, your browser security will reject the connection. The explorer guide gives 2 options to fix this browser limitation.

1\) you can put an ssl cert on your remote server (difficult, costly) 2) disable insecure content for the zkga.me domain (not good security practice in crypto where we really need good security practices).

But those aren't the only solutions!. Instead we can make a remote server look like a local server with a few command lines.

## Port forward with ssh

SSH is a way to access remote machines and allows port forwarding. To set this up there are a few simple steps:

### 1. Installing ssh

SSH is already installed on GNU/Linux. For Windows install your favorite application.

### 2. Editing `~/.ssh/config`

This step is done so that you can ssh into machines without typing commandflags each time. Replace the 192 ip and user with your server.

Here is an example entry:

```bash
    Host miner
        Hostname 192.168.178.132
        User user
        Port 22
        Localforward 8001 localhost:8000
```

> If you have multiple miner copy/paste the entry and then increment the first port number by one

### Connecting

Use `ssh miner` to connect to the remote server and forward the port. Notice how `miner` stands for the ip address in the `~/.ssh/config`.

Once you drop into the shell start `mimc-fast` or whatever remote miner client you're using.

### Plugin use

The Plugin is called Remote Explorer and is in the official client, but does need one change from the default. Instead the default url `http://0.0.0.0:8000/mine` well use `http://localhost:8001/mine`

### Using key based authentication

If you're sick of typing your password to your server, we can fix that too. On your local machine client generate a key with `ssh-keygen`

Then copy it over to your miner with `ssh-copy-id miner` and type your user password for the last time ever.


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