[mosh-users] Questions about mosh(1) and mosh futures

[Kevin Oberman]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Keith Winstein <keithw at mit.edu> wrote:
> Hello Kevin,
>
> Thanks for getting in touch!
>
> 1. mosh doesn't provide file copying right now. We've had some talk
> about doing it, but I wouldn't expect it in the near term. If we do do
> it, we will definitely look into the scp issues you bring up and do
> our best to avoid them in our own implementation -- thanks for
> bringing this to our attention.
>
> 2. Yes, mosh should support any authentication means that OpenSSH
> does. The "mosh" script invokes SSH to log in to the server and
> remotely execute the "mosh-server" process, and will use whatever
> authentication means (password, public key, etc.) SSH is set up to
> use. If you have trouble for some reason, please let us know (or file
> a bug on github) and we should be able to help you get it working.
>
> 3. We have some users who have gotten mosh working on cygwin. Would
> this meet your needs for a Windows client?
>
> 4. I think when we do X tunnelling, general TCP port tunnelling should
> be basically the same thing, so sure.
>
> Thanks again for your interest.
>
> Best regards,
> Keith

Keith,

Thanks again for the quick response. Now that it's morning, I can make
some comments.

First, if I had read a bit more of the documentation, I would have
known that ssh was taking care of the authentication. Sorry for the
wasted bits.

I'm not sure if cygwin is adequate, but where I work (ESnet), we have
mostly switched to Macs, so Windows is mostly an issue for a few admin
types and not the engineers who would be the primary beneficiaries of
mosh's capabilities. (I'm an odd man out since I run FreeBSD on my
personal and work systems, but that's not an issue for mosh.)

So I guess tunneling is the only show-stopper from my point of view.
And that is really a show stopper as I depend heavily on X clients on
remote systems.

Thanks again for your work on this and for responding so quickly to my
questions. Lack of mobility has long been my only real gripe about ssh
and it looks like mosh may just take care of that.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: kob6558 at gmail.com