[mosh-devel] mosh used for one-off commands and/or independent of ssh

[Christoph von Stuckrad]

On 02.10.2012 23:26, Edward Peschko wrote:
...
> mostly qa and testing and under a Expect harness, and ssh has the
> unfortunate tendency to freeze and inopportune times, and is not all
> that stable on cygwin.
...
> 3. Can mosh run a standalone command, like ssh?
...
> stability - as it stands, we spend a lot of time debugging the testing
> harness rather than actual issues, and its my hunch that mosh could
> help out a lot here.. Suggestions other than mosh are appreciated

Having experimented with expect to automate remote 'terminals' on
computers of 'the other department' I do remember well the resulting
issues of deadlocking or seeing strange 'blocking sizes' on the net.

I think mosh may avoid many of the otherwise deadlocking situations
by the the way it keeps the connection going. But as far as I understand
mosh, it always keeps a representation of the 'terminal'(pty, screen)
on each side and so always works like 'ssh -t' would. The use of pipes,
like in 'ssh user at host command' without pty, may not exist in mosh.
(In my opinion ssh without pty is mostly useless anyway, because it
looses the distinction between stdout and stderr mixing them together).
I use mosh from cygwin-client to linux server and run interactive
commands by the same commandline as ssh (e.g. reconnecting to a screen)
like "mosh host screen -S screenname -r" or "mosh user at host byobu"
and had working connections up for days from windows to my office.
(Though I never tried to run expect-scripts on cygwin myself)

Stucki