I find it useful to have shell aliases set up for the machines that I
connect to with SSH, so I can type myrtle (or myrtle ps -ef)
rather than ssh myrtle. I used to configure these by hand, but it
occurred to me that I already had entries for all these machines in my
SSH config file so that I could use the short names in other
applications:
Host myrtle
HostName myrtle.kent.ac.uk
My bash configuration now includes ssh.sh, which
scans .ssh/config for Host foo lines, and creates a foo alias for
each one.