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

[William Stearns]

Good morning, Keith, Kevin, all,

On Thu, 12 Apr 2012, Kevin Oberman wrote:

> 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.

 	You might consider continuing to use ssh for any features that 
mosh does not provide at the moment (tcp tunneling, X tunneling, scp), and 
using mosh for the interactive terminal.

> 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.

 	SSH _can_ do something like mobility (using screen and/or using 
IP/IP tunneling), but it takes some real effort.  My sense is that mosh 
handles it _far_ more gracefully.
 	Cheers,
 	- Bill

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William Stearns (wstearns at pobox.com, tools and papers: www.stearns.org)
Top-notch computer security training at www.sans.org , www.giac.net
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