Ok, so you’ve got FreeBSD installed, you have enabled SSH during the installation¹, you’ve edited your sudoers file and now you’re sitting back at your main computer ready to start remotely administering your server. The first thing you’re going to need to do is download an ssh client, if you’re using Windows I recommend PuTTY, if you’re using OSX or Linux you have one built in, just go to the terminal and type ssh [theipofyourserver].

Once you have PuTTY installed open the app and type the IP of your server in the “Host Name: (Or IP address)” field ^{Fig 1.} and hit enter. Then you’ll be presented with the familiar login: prompt. Login with your normal user name and password and you should be given your very own shell prompt. ^{Fig 2.}

Footnote 1: If you didn’t install sshd during installation you can easily do so after the fact. Just login as root, bring up the installer by typing sysinstall and hitting enter. Once at the familiar installer go down to configure, hit enter, go down to networking, then go all the way near the bottom to sshd, press space to select it then press o to exit the menu. Then X to exit the configure menu and then x to exit sysinstall. Now you can restart your server using “shutdown -r now” without quotes and you should now have ssh running.