[mosh-devel] stripping locale support from mosh

[Edward Peschko]

Keith,

Thanks for this - if you don't mind, I'll continue to post if/when I
find issues.

When I finally get things working, I think that it just may be worth
it to package all of the changes up into a configure flavor of mosh
that is specifically geared towards automation - having a robust tool
to handle automation on as many devices as possible would be a very
worthwhile thing to have.

That being said, the one thing that I see needing would be to be able
to run mosh in 'byte serialization' mode, ie: where all the output is
captured, buffered, and sent over the socket udp fashion - time delay
on lossy networks isn't a big deal here, what's important is the
ability to capture the output and parse it automatically by the
client.

So, is it possible to just as easily disable SSP and just send all output?

Failing that, is there a really rock-solid tcp-to-udp forwarding
protocol out there? Ideally, I'd have the ssh server forward its
traffic to a udp server, and then relay that traffic back to a udp
client that would then forward it to a ssh client, and all trickiness
with the TCP protocol would be handled by a large buffer server side,
and network choppiness handled by a very forgiving UDP transfer
policy. I've tried duat and tcpoverudp, but they don't really impress
me that much, with ssh connections closing after 2 mins or so of wall
clock time.

Anyways, any ideas on this would be very much appreciated.

Thanks much,

Ed

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Keith Winstein <keithw at mit.edu> wrote:
> Hi Ed,
>
> You can force mosh to start up outside a UTF-8 charset by editing the
> is_utf8_locale() function (in src/util/locale_utils.cc) to always
> return true. (Patch attached.)
>
> As you can appreciate, it's a lot easier to maintain a terminal
> emulator for _one_ charset than to try to make it agile and support
> more than one. (UTF-8 vt220s are not backwards-compatible with 8-bit
> vt220s, unfortunately, and screen historically has had loads of bugs
> trying to convert between the two.) I don't think we're really eager
> to support Mosh in more configurations because it gets complicated
> quickly.
>
> But you're welcome to turn off our paranoid checks if you need to in
> your configuration. Hope this helps.
>
> Best regards,
> Keith
>
> On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 4:09 AM, Edward Peschko <horos11 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> All,
>>
>> Again, this is in pursuit of better, more bullet proof connections in
>> automation. Could mosh perhaps be able to disable locale support, or
>> make it optional?
>>
>> For several applications of mosh (including mine) unfortunately this
>> is critical - the 'devices' we produce, for example are stripped down
>> versions of centos and hence DON'T have any locale info installed (in
>> fact there isn't even the locale binary) and hence the locale
>> requirement makes using mosh infeasible..
>>
>> Having an option to compile mosh with plain-old ascii would be great
>> here - elsewise I'm not sure how I could use mosh as I envision here.
>>
>> Thanks much, and workarounds again are appreciated..
>>
>> Ed
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