title: What is Secure Shell or SSH? How does it work?
body: <p>I am in the process of setting up a digital ocean droplet. I have very little experience with networking and sysadmin tasks.</p>
  <p>All of the documentation and tutorials about setting up this droplet highly suggests that I set up an SSH connection. Upon googling, I get very broad definitions and videos of what SSH is, but I cannot seem to conceptualize exactly how it works.</p>
  <p>I've even followed the directions of the some of the tutorials without any issue, so apparently I've even accomplished doing this before with my other droplets. However, whenever I log into my droplet with PuTTY or WinSCP, I still need to provide a username and password (even if the password is saved, I need to type it in to save it).</p>
  <p>Other pieces of information I've obtained:</p>
  <ul>
  <li><p>When stepping through this process, I noticed that linux will STILL ask me to create a passphrase. But, a lot of the reading I did seemed to suggest I would not need to for some reason.</p>
  </li>
  <li><p>There is a public and private key. I can't seem to understand what each is for, or what's the difference.</p>
  </li>
  <li><p>I don't do anything to my home computer. Is an SSH connection verifying that I am indeed logging into my server through my home computer? If that is in fact the case, how does this process know I am logging into my server with my home computer if I did not provide any information about my home computer at all? (Everything was done through PuTTY on my server remotely).</p>
  </li>
  <li><p>According to a lot of what I read, after setting up SSH, you are then supposed to disable root user access. I'm just not seeing why.</p>
  </li>
  </ul>
  <p>I'm just not really understanding what it is that I'm doing when I create private and public keys. I still have to provide my username and a password when logging into my server with WinSCP and PuTTY. Am I doing something wrong? In reference to SSH; what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Am I doing it right despite the fact that I still have to provide a password when logging in?</p>
  <p>If possible, take an &quot;explaining this to a 5-year old&quot; approach.</p>