In this post I’m demonstrating how you could use Hashicorp’s Vault TOTP generator and an authenticator to connect to a dynamic ssh port. This is mostly a proof of concept and not a production grade solution, so use at your own risk.

What’s TOTP? It’s a Time-based One Time Password. TBOTP is probably too ugly of an acronym to have gained widespread use. I don’t know, I didn’t coin it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m limited to about 80MB/s on downloads on my VPC at Digital Ocean, but I run Nzbget for downloading large files from usenet. It doesn’t take long to download at all, but out of curiosity I wanted to see if I could parallelize this and download multiple files at the same. I use Sonarr for searching usenet for freely distributable training videos which then sends them to NZBget for downloading. Since Sonarr can send multiple files to nzbget which get queued up, I figured I can reduce the queue by downloading them at the same time.

Using Ansible and Terraform (devops automation tools), I can spin up VPC on demand, provision them, configure them as nzbget download nodes and then destroy the instances when complete.