10 ms·

Mosh: SSH for 2012

900 points by pc 15y ago

tlack 15y ago
Brilliant! Wish list: file transfer.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  Seing as this already requires ssh, what's wrong with scp (I guess I'm assuming if you have ssh, you have scp, but I've never found that to not be the case).
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - ch0wn 15y ago
    Or even better: rsync tunneled over ssh.
  - param 15y ago
    Ability to resume. Actually, this would be awesome for file transfer because I could fire and forget and not have to worry about interruptions when I get off the train/my laptop goes to sleep or the battery runs out.
stcredzero 15y ago
Mosh works differently and at a different layer. With Mosh, the server and client both maintain a snapshot of the current screen state. The problem becomes one of state-synchronization: getting the client to the most recent server-side screen as efficiently as possible. This is brilliant! Combine that with the ability to rejoin your session and it's even more so -- only figures since the major use of screen was to enable this functionality over ssh.
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  > only figures since the major use of screen was to enable this functionality over ssh. Exactly - I don't understand what Mosh provides that GNU Screen doesn't... what problem is it actually solving?
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    Packaging this functionality of screen with fewer manual steps with a protocol that provides a better experience over high latency connections.
    - wdaher 15y ago
      Well, that and, this and screen are not mutually exclusive. I run a screen session inside my mosh all the time!
  - enneff 15y ago
    Persistent connections regardless of your connectivity. I just unplugged my laptop from ethernet and walked into the living room. When the wifi connected my mosh sessions continued where they left off.
    - throwaway64 15y ago
      with autossh and tmux i get exactly the same behaviour
Maakuth 15y ago
Man, this could be perfect companion for screen and irssi. I wish there will be an Android client soon.
- pooriaazimi 15y ago
  Not yet supported, but on the roadmap: * X11 forwarding * IPv6-only hosts or networks * Android client
  - bound008 15y ago
    once it has IPv6 you can use it with iCloud and Back To My Mac.
- hamax 15y ago
  I set it up for that exact purpose. I'm using irssi on a remote server and it's annoying to reconnect every time I connect or disconnect from VPN. For now it works great. And yes, having an Android client would be super sweet. I really hope this becomes popular.
moonboots 15y ago
This reminds me of Google Wave's operation transformation protocol except without the collaboration component [1]. Client edits are reflected instantly and client state is synchronized and reconciled with the server's. [1] http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transfor...
secure 15y ago
I’ve been using this for a bit and it works pretty well most of the time (I especially like the prediction). On bad connections, I hadn’t have much luck with it (it timed out just like other TCP connections), but I only had a sample size of 1 ;). Also note that it doesn’t support IPv6 (there is a quick & dirty working patch in the github issue for that).
rasengan 15y ago
Mac OS X Lion: Mac OS X Lion dyld: Library not loaded: /Users/keithwinstein/homebrew/lib/libprotobuf.7.dylib Referenced from: /usr/bin/mosh-client Reason: image not found
- Kishin 15y ago
  same error on OSX Lion. Also tried building from source and got: "No package 'protobuf' found" Very excited to try this though!
  - keithwinstein 15y ago
    Please try the new PKG (mosh-1.1.3-2.pkg) -- should be fixed. Thanks for your patience!
    - rasengan 15y ago
      Thanks Keith
jjcm 15y ago
How well does this work for something like vim? Line editing and mass transfer of commands is great if you're sending a long string, but if each keystroke is a command it seems like things would get stickier.
- ElliotH 15y ago
  " It does this adaptively and works even in full-screen programs like emacs and vim" Would imply it does work well.
- a1k0n 15y ago
  It seems to work just fine. The local prediction looks kind of ugly with colorcolumn enabled, though, since it assumes characters are being inserted when doing local prediction, which shifts the colored column right for each keystroke until the update comes in from the server to fix it.
invalidOrTaken 15y ago
What I find especially interesting is how they explicitly decided to design the site like a startup's. I always think it's cool when philanthropy learns from commercial enterprises.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  It's just bootstrap [1], it's a laziness/cheapness/time constraint thing, not really mimicking. [1]: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap
  - elliottcarlson 15y ago
    Note that the screenshot has a listing of "ideas" for the site - including a note that says "Make it look like a fake startup company."
  - antihero 15y ago
    Honestly I'm actually getting really bored and annoyed with the amount of Twitter Bootstrap sites now, that don't change themselves at all.
  - alwillis 15y ago
    If it was really about laziness, cheapness or time constraints, they would have just put up a Github README and would have been done. Seems pretty clear they’re breaking with the crappy, poorly designed webpages open source software—especially anything having to do with networking or security—often have. These guys understand: how something is presented matters too; not just how well the code works.
joejohnson 15y ago
When I try to run mosh on my Mac (after installing from the .pkg provided) I get this error: Can't locate IO/Pty.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.3/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.3 /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.12.3/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.12.3 /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.12.3/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.12.3 /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl .) at /usr/bin/mosh line 24. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/bin/mosh line 24. Is anyone else getting this error?
- SeoxyS 15y ago
  You're using MacPort's install of Perl, instead of the OSX's default. Edit the shebang in /usr/local/bin/mosh to point to /url/bin/perl. Anyway, that did the trick for me.
- joejohnson 15y ago
  Never mind, the latest package (mosh-1.1.3-2.pkg) fixed it.
- peterwwillis 15y ago
  I found this annoying too. It's not a core Perl module so it should be listed on requirements page. And really, do we need this complicated of a perl wrapper when they already wrote a C++ client?
excerionsforte 15y ago
This actually sounds pretty sweet. I'm gonna try it on my vps! You get my upvote.
- chashaz 15y ago
  Ya...the features of Mosh sound quite interesting..there's been a lot of times when I forgot to quit out of my shell & had everything messed up...so had to relogin, etc. so this will certainly help. But one thing that I'm still not that sure about is the security...is mosh secure like ssh? It obviously acts as a client on top of that protocol if I'm not wrong then it should be pretty secure right?
ramidarigaz 15y ago
This looks really cool! One question. I have a firewall (ufw) that is blocking most ports (I have a small whitelist). It looks like Mosh uses a UDP port between 60000 and 61000. Is there a way to pick a port for Mosh to use, or do I have to open that range of ports? It's not a huge deal either way, but it would be cool if I could tell it to use a specific port. Oops. Nevermind. It looks like -p is what I want.
DarkShikari 15y ago
Is there any reason why Windows or at least Cygwin isn't supported? Much of the time, the whole point of SSH for me is to connect to a Unix machine from a non-Unix machine.
- keithwinstein 15y ago
  The code compiles under Cygwin with not too much effort -- the current master may compile. The big problem there is you don't really have a good UTF-8 terminal, but you're welcome to use it. If you know how we can best package the software for Windows or Cygwin users, we're happy to take a patch. (github.com/keithw/mosh.git)
  - tedunangst 15y ago
    Start with the putty source and integrate the mosh protocol?
  - nooop 15y ago
    Cygwin has a built-in utf-8 terminal that I find quite descent. (Only for some months, it did not have it before.)
    - keithwinstein 15y ago
      Just posted some more terminal geekery on http://mosh.mit.edu http://mosh.mit.edu -- I'd be interested how the Cygwin terminal does on the test cases shown there.
      - mcpherrinm 15y ago
        Those test cases look useful -- Do you know of any more sets? I'm writing a terminal emulator out of interest, in hopefully a cross-platform way. I'm personally frustrated by the existing ones. Got any wish-list items for one?
      - J_Darnley 15y ago
        Mintty, badly. The first test gives no hat (or I just can't see it). The second causes it to get stuck in heiroglyphs. The third doesn't work correctly either. It looks like it prints xyz correctly, then jumps to the second line on screen and then continues from there. The "cygwin bash shell" which uses cmd.exe does the first test correctly but similarly fails on the others.
forgotusername 15y ago
> Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It's more robust and responsive, > Mosh doesn't listen on network ports or authenticate users. The mosh client logs in to the server via SSH Umm.. > Unlike SSH, mosh's UDP-based protocol handles packet loss gracefully So it's not a replacement for SSH, but instead sits on top. Not only that, but it has some separate self-designed protocol that it uses to implement its ju-ju, presumably heavily peer reviewed for security design defects considering the claims of being an SSH replacement that are being made. :)
- ezyang 15y ago
  It's a replacement in the sense that, whenever you'd type 'ssh', you should type 'mosh' instead.
  - wdaher 15y ago
    Exactly. It just happens to use ssh to bootstrap itself.
    - keithwinstein 15y ago
      Yeah -- we use ssh to authenticate the user and log them in and start up the mosh server (an unprivileged helper process). Then we shut down the SSH connection and establish a direct (roaming) connection over UDP.
      - zobzu 15y ago
        haskish :)
    - forgotusername 15y ago
      There are 101 million ways to screw these kinds of protocols up, that's why I'm sceptical. There are too many avenues to list, but here are a few: * Security product written in C++, leveraging 2 huge libraries (Google protocolbuffers, Boost) * One man band by the looks of it * Includes its own private crypto code (has rijndael-alg-fst.cc been vetted for timing issues?) * Implements its own private crypto protocol (has it been vetted for replay attacks? padding attacks? [insert 20 years of perplexing bugs confounding the greatest minds in computer science]?) etc. And besides all that, this page is begging you to download it. It ticks every box: sexy Bootstrap design, prepackaged installers for every OS, and not one mention of a single downside! That raises the question: what is the author's agenda? (At a guess, school cred, but still, this isn't reason enough for me to swap out something as critical as SSH)
wdaher 15y ago
I'll confess that I always run mosh with -a because it looks cooler when you see it predictively echoing text that you wouldn't otherwise get.
mmahemoff 15y ago
I'd like to see SSH optimised for touch-based user interfaces. On mobile, we're stuck with crappy touch keyboards for at least the next few years (until serious haptic feedback or to some extent voice recognition becomes feasible). I'm not even sure what it would look like. I just know that SSH right now is not a very pleasant experience.
- Tossrock 15y ago
  In my imagination, it would be a touch-optimized way to issue commands. By checking your history file, the program could build a library of your most used commands. So maybe you tap a pleasantly large icon representing the server you want to connect to, it does the authentication for you, and then you get a pleasantly large list of your top 10 commands (scroll down for more). You click "apachectl", and then "restart" from the sublist that pops up. Add the "sudo" modifier and then tap a final pleasantly large button to issue the command. For actual text editing, it could just drop you into something like ConnectBot or Terminal.
- fusiongyro 15y ago
  I'm having trouble imagining what role SSH or its replacement has in reinventing the text terminal for touch-based user interfaces. Seems like the whole idea would have to go out the window. VNC would work if the destination were also touch-based, but it's probably mouse-based, and I don't know at what level that's integrated into the protocol (probably too low).
  - ryangee 15y ago
    http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/ http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/
    - fusiongyro 15y ago
      I've actually seen this before, and it is awesome, but it doesn't answer the question of how to re-imagine a text console for touch.
jimmyjim 15y ago
Pretty cool, but some of its aims can be achieved in other safer ways: * Use tmux, a multi-plexer, so you never lose the state of a program * Use KiTTY as an SSH client- http://kitty.9bis.com/ http://kitty.9bis.com/ - enable 'Reconnect' options * Configure http tunnelling if you want, it's trivially easy to set up with either Chrome or Firefox The end result: an SSH connection that's always alive when I need it to be. When I open up my laptop's lid, it reconnects automatically, and because I've set up keys (without a passphrase) I do not have to do _anything_ and I'm all good to go. You can have a tmux attach command coded and you really do not have to do a thing. Some other notes: KiTTY is a PuTTY fork, with many new extremely delicious features (hyper links, better clipboard support, etc.) To tunnel your http traffic (for when you're in a public spot and would opt for basic security): Connection > SSH > Tunnels. Add a dynamic port... and concordantly configure proxy settings on your browser's end. For Firefox you don't need any extensions... for Chrome this extension, in my experiences, is fairly decent: http://switchy.samabox.com/ http://switchy.samabox.com/ -- these directions will work for both PuTTY and KiTTY. >> SSH waits for the server's reply before showing you your own typing. That can make for a lousy user interface. Mosh is different: it gives an instant response to typing, deleting, and line editing. It does this adaptively and works even in full-screen programs like emacs and vim. If real-time text rendering is a must for you, consider TRAMP: http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ Also consider using EmacsClient: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient And for vim, apparently there's netrw: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1075 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1075
- aaronblohowiak 15y ago
  keys without passphrase? i hope they do not connect to a publicly available server with other people's data on it.
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    If it's on OS X, keychains does a pretty good job of unlocking your (password secured) private key transparently. That's preferable to leaving your private key sitting around without a passphrase.
ezy 15y ago
Ok, I'll be "that guy". Why not just use tmux or screen? Is character delay a real issue in 2012? Seems like it's more of a proof of concept of their syncing algorithm rather than something super useful. EDIT: Fair enough, I stand corrected. :-)
- nelhage 15y ago
  The killer app is not actually the predictive echo, but the improved handling of lossy networks and roaming between networks. On a crappy wifi hotspot that regularly craps out for a few seconds? mosh will notice and recover the instant it comes back, whereas ssh will have a delay or may not recover at all. Suspend your laptop with an active connection and come up an hour later on a different connection? mosh will instantly restablish connection like nothing happened.
- joblessjunkie 15y ago
  I find character delay to be an ongoing frustration while using ssh with remote servers all day long. When I've mis-typed and need to backspace, I'm usually a couple of keystrokes ahead by the time I see it. I have to pause, wait, count, and carefully press backspace a precise number of times, and frequently get it wrong. For nearby connections, it's no big deal, but cross-continent or overseas it's a right pain.
  - Florin_Andrei 15y ago
    > a right pain British English?
    - sambeau 15y ago
      Read "a right pain" as "genuinely frustrating" or "really annoying".
    - nollidge 15y ago
      Not sure why you got downvoted. Yes, that's definitely a more British construction.
redbad 15y ago
Datagrams are encrypted and authenticated using AES-128 in OCB mode. I'm curious to know more details. Does it leverage existing SSH auth infrastructure (ie. keys) for that, somehow?
- keithwinstein 15y ago
  Not exactly, no -- it's a new roaming secure datagram protocol. It uses SSH for the initial key _exchange_: if you run "mosh-server" by itself, you'll see it spit out a random 128-bit session key that protects the mosh session.
  - marshray 15y ago
    Is the protocol documented? I've looked at DTLS and I'm wondering how you prevent replay attacks and such.
    - keithwinstein 15y ago
      It is documented in the research paper linked from the site, yeah. The big contribution with this protocol is that every authenticated datagram represents an idempotent operation on the recipient, so we don't have to worry about replay attacks as such.
      - marshray 15y ago
        I'm not sure how a terminal session can use only idempotent operations, but it sounds cool. I'll have to read the paper!
skeletonjelly 15y ago
No results for searching for "secur*" on that page. Are there any risks?
- throwaway54-762 15y ago
  Try searching for "aes" and "ocb".
  - skeletonjelly 15y ago
    Ah thanks. Missed that in my cursory glance. I'm still curious as to the ramifications for sysadmins. SSH hardening guides have been around since forever. While this doesn't dramatically change things do you think it still needs some reliable advice on best use (static UDP ports etc)?
- acqq 15y ago
  I also miss a discussion of how the protocol avoid denials of service once it's assumed that the UDP comes from any address -- if every packet from any address actually has to be decrypted.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    Denial of service concerns seem to be at least briefly discussed in the paper (which I have not finished reading yet): 2 We do not prevent against a denial-of-service attack where an ac- tive attacker intercepts packets and resends them under its own IP ad- dress to fool the server’s roaming detection. Such an attack would not compromise the confidentiality of the connection but would disrupt it. (Not the same scenario as you are describing, but still.)
throwaway54-762 15y ago
Note for Fedora users: this update was only pushed to stable yesterday[0] so you may not yet see it in your local package mirror. [0]: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-5085/mosh-1.1.1-1.fc16 https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-5085/mos...
- Florin_Andrei 15y ago
  Is there a .src.rpm somewhere?
  - achernya 15y ago
    Assuming you are running the latest Fedora, you can get the SRPM from the main Fedora Project servers: http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/updates/16/SRPMS/mosh-1.1.1-1.fc16.src.rpm http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/updates/16/SRPM... There are source and binary packages for Fedora 15, 16, the upcoming 17, and rawhide. You can configure your yum to use dl.fedoraproject.org instead of a choosing a mirror to get the latest updates, if you want.
denisu 15y ago
Am I blind or is there no way to connect to a custom ssh-port (other than 22) for the initial connection yet? edit: github-issue: https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/103 https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/103
- glesica 15y ago
  I've browsed through the site and installed to look at the man page to find this out. I can't see a way to do this. Makes it useless for me :-( Not that I'm complaining. It's not like I'm being asked to pay for it, just a feature that I imagine would be helpful to many people...
  - keithwinstein 15y ago
    Thanks, we're working on it and it will be in a future release. We're tracking this issue at https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/53 https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/53
- denisu 15y ago
  A workaround for this is to change the ssh default port in your ssh config file.
- wnoise 15y ago
  In .ssh/config: Host alias Hostname realname.domain Port alternate_port
za 15y ago
related - Rocks: Reliable Sockets (unmaintained) http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~zandy/rocks/ http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~zandy/rocks/
ComputerGuru 15y ago
Note (for keithwinstein?): mosh doesn't handle iftop output properly. It may be that iftop abuses UTF8 or takes advantage of a bug to print certain characters, but it's not working right with mosh.
- keithwinstein 15y ago
  Thanks. The quick fix is to run "LANG=C luit iftop" instead. More detail: The problem is that we've made a design decision not to honor ISO 2022 locking escape sequences (which can be used as line-drawing characters), because they can end up sticking the terminal in permanent hieroglyphs and UTF-8 is supposed to be a stateless, self-synchronizing encoding. (See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#term http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#term for more detail than you probably want, or the examples I just added to mosh.mit.edu.) We use the NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1 environment variable to request UTF-8 from ncurses instead of ISO 2022, and 99% of programs honor that -- but iftop is not one of them. It's within its rights, but I think these programs are rare enough that if you want to use the old-style line-drawing characters in mosh, it would be better to run just that program in luit (which is a translator), so that at least when luit exits, you'll be out of hieroglyphs for sure.
  - ComputerGuru 15y ago
    No go. "LANG=C luit iftop" in mosh or a normal shell is the same result as running iftop in mosh. http://cl.ly/423P2B0u212B0k3j0g0X http://cl.ly/423P2B0u212B0k3j0g0X vs http://cl.ly/0M3f0o2c0O243v3z1N0W http://cl.ly/0M3f0o2c0O243v3z1N0W
mock 15y ago
I wonder how easy it would be to hook this up to dns tunneling software such as http://code.kryo.se/iodine/ http://code.kryo.se/iodine/ in such a way that after the the initial ssh auth step, you would have a useful terminal that would be accessible even behind captive portals and the like?
- achernya 15y ago
  I've used mosh over iodine, by simply having the iodine-server forward all of my packets via IPv4 NAT. I then set my client gateway to use dns0 instead of eth0. Works great!
ggchappell 15y ago
Do I understand correctly: to use mosh, I must have mosh-server available on the remote machine (?).
- sinosc 15y ago
  »Then Mosh runs the mosh-server remotely and connects to it over UDP« i.e. yes
- bostonvaulter2 15y ago
  Shouldn't it be possible to install the mosh-server over the network from the client machine. Similar to what sshuttle does?
- mellifluousmind 15y ago
  The documentation doesn't say this, but apparently, after you start mosh-server, it dies if there is no incoming request within 60 seconds. What is the point of the server if it is just going to quit after 60 seconds?
  - charliesome 15y ago
    mosh-server is started up by mosh-client when it first SSH's in
stevejb 15y ago
This looks fantastic and seems like a very much needed part of the ssh ecosystem. Most of my work is sshing from my home computer to servers in the cloud, and this seems like it will be perfect for mitigating the feeling of lag.
philipithomas 15y ago
Intriguing, but I feel that most of the efficiency problems it tries to overcome can be mostly remedied by key-based SSH access. Can anyone comment on this?
- ef4 15y ago
  It's solving a completely different problem. In fact it doesn't change SSH's authentication at all, so you'd still use your existing ssh key.
Scaevolus 15y ago
I wish this used CurveCP.
zhuzhuor 15y ago
ocb is patented... although the author claims it is "currently" free for gpl code. What are you guys thinking? At least only supporting one protocol is not that good.
- djmdjm 15y ago
  I was very surprised at the use of OCB and not one of the other more widely-used authenticated encryption modes like EAX or GCM.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nwmcsween 15y ago
Ok so is the authentication pluggable (authorization I'm presuming is handled by pam and such)? Can I use Kerberos instead of SSH?
rman666 15y ago
(funny/sarcastic joke about Mosh Pit)
st3fan 15y ago
Note to self: "brew install mosh" installs a scheme implementation. Install mobile-shell instead.
aq11 15y ago
Nice enough idea; but having protobuf and boost as deps is just silly for a system utility.
kirpekar 15y ago
No X11 kills the deal for me.
- lfaraone 15y ago
  You can run X11 in a separate terminal? Anyway, doing network-resilient X11 is a harder problem than just ttys.
lisnake 15y ago
Does it have -R option like ssh, for port forwarding inside ssh session? Otherwise, I won't be able to connect to my work machines behind very strict firewall
tiernano 15y ago
wasent Mosh the name of Powershell before it became PowerShell? Monad was the code name, MOSH (MOnad SHell) was a name for it too...
joliss 15y ago
I'm scared to trust Mosh with my connection security, but the local echo sounds awesome. What happens if I tunnel my Mosh connection through SSH? Will I still get all the features (except for roaming, obviously)?
- guan 15y ago
  Mosh sends its payload data through UDP, which you cannot tunnel through SSH.
peterwwillis 15y ago
Well shit. My VPS's glibc version does not have 64 bit byte-swapping functions, so I can't compile mosh for my platform. =( Can the authors update their requirements to list glibc 2.9 and perl IO::Pty module if they're compiling it themselves? Edit: I hacked the swapping functions into mosh and built it, but my system lacks a UTF-8 locale, according to mosh (even after I copied an en_US.utf8 locale to the system). Not sure how to proceed
sgt 15y ago
When connecting (for the first time) to a mosh server I get the following error message: /usr/bin/mosh: Did not find mosh server startup message. <it then disconnects> Server runs FreeBSD and the client is OS X. Any ideas?
- wdaher 15y ago
  Is mosh installed on the server? If you just normally ssh to the server and run "mosh-server", does it actually do something? (maybe it's not in your PATH?)
  - sgt 15y ago
    It's in my PATH. If I do that, this happens: freebsd$ mosh-server MOSH CONNECT 60001 cPiSdaPVTjKA/JQjy5jExg mosh-server (mosh 1.1.3) Copyright 2012 Keith Winstein <mosh-devel@mit.edu> License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. [mosh-server detached, pid = 2751] Warning: termios IUTF8 flag not defined. Character-erase of multibyte character sequence probably does not work properly on this platform. However back on the OS X desktop, if I do the following: osx$ export MOSH_KEY=cPiSdaPVTjKA/JQjy5jExg osx$ mosh-client 18.4.12.5 60001 <it now starts connecting, but server side complains "Crypto exception: Packet failed integrity check.">
Arubis 15y ago
For specific use cases this is an absolute lifesaver. I live a bit away from "normal" internet connections and will often go days without access to better than a weak GPRS signal. Being able to reliably issue commands without stabbing myself waiting for local echo/reinitiating the connection a dozen times/thinking about my AWS credit slipping away makes this something I would pay to use.
jongraehl 15y ago
Nice homage in the terminal window (Mosh Web Site Ideas) to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Important_Things_with_Demetri_Martin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Important_Things_with_Demetri_M... :)
ricardobeat 15y ago
Is it usable behind NAT/firewalls, as an alternative to a reverse tunnel?
markus2012 14y ago
I've used mosh for about 10 days. It's worked perfectly for me. I disconnect/re-connect my laptop quite a bit between work/home/meeting rooms/hotels. My mosh sessions have lived through it all. I haven't had to restart or reconnect it once. I'd send feedback directly to the mosh folks, but I have to subscribe to do so. A general thought for any project: please make it easy for folks to provide feedback.

Mosh: SSH for 2012

900 points by pc 15y ago

tlack 15y ago

Brilliant! Wish list: file transfer.

drivebyacct2 15y ago
Seing as this already requires ssh, what's wrong with scp (I guess I'm assuming if you have ssh, you have scp, but I've never found that to not be the case).
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ch0wn 15y ago
  Or even better: rsync tunneled over ssh.
- param 15y ago
  Ability to resume. Actually, this would be awesome for file transfer because I could fire and forget and not have to worry about interruptions when I get off the train/my laptop goes to sleep or the battery runs out.

stcredzero 15y ago

Mosh works differently and at a different layer. With Mosh, the server and client both maintain a snapshot of the current screen state. The problem becomes one of state-synchronization: getting the client to the most recent server-side screen as efficiently as possible. This is brilliant! Combine that with the ability to rejoin your session and it's even more so -- only figures since the major use of screen was to enable this functionality over ssh.

chimeracoder 15y ago
> only figures since the major use of screen was to enable this functionality over ssh. Exactly - I don't understand what Mosh provides that GNU Screen doesn't... what problem is it actually solving?
- stcredzero 15y ago
  Packaging this functionality of screen with fewer manual steps with a protocol that provides a better experience over high latency connections.
  - wdaher 15y ago
    Well, that and, this and screen are not mutually exclusive. I run a screen session inside my mosh all the time!
- enneff 15y ago
  Persistent connections regardless of your connectivity. I just unplugged my laptop from ethernet and walked into the living room. When the wifi connected my mosh sessions continued where they left off.
  - throwaway64 15y ago
    with autossh and tmux i get exactly the same behaviour

Maakuth 15y ago

Man, this could be perfect companion for screen and irssi. I wish there will be an Android client soon.

pooriaazimi 15y ago
Not yet supported, but on the roadmap: * X11 forwarding * IPv6-only hosts or networks * Android client
- bound008 15y ago
  once it has IPv6 you can use it with iCloud and Back To My Mac.
hamax 15y ago
I set it up for that exact purpose. I'm using irssi on a remote server and it's annoying to reconnect every time I connect or disconnect from VPN. For now it works great. And yes, having an Android client would be super sweet. I really hope this becomes popular.

moonboots 15y ago

This reminds me of Google Wave's operation transformation protocol except without the collaboration component [1]. Client edits are reflected instantly and client state is synchronized and reconciled with the server's. [1] http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transfor...

secure 15y ago

I’ve been using this for a bit and it works pretty well most of the time (I especially like the prediction). On bad connections, I hadn’t have much luck with it (it timed out just like other TCP connections), but I only had a sample size of 1 ;). Also note that it doesn’t support IPv6 (there is a quick & dirty working patch in the github issue for that).

rasengan 15y ago

Mac OS X Lion: Mac OS X Lion dyld: Library not loaded: /Users/keithwinstein/homebrew/lib/libprotobuf.7.dylib Referenced from: /usr/bin/mosh-client Reason: image not found

Kishin 15y ago
same error on OSX Lion. Also tried building from source and got: "No package 'protobuf' found" Very excited to try this though!
- keithwinstein 15y ago
  Please try the new PKG (mosh-1.1.3-2.pkg) -- should be fixed. Thanks for your patience!
  - rasengan 15y ago
    Thanks Keith

jjcm 15y ago

How well does this work for something like vim? Line editing and mass transfer of commands is great if you're sending a long string, but if each keystroke is a command it seems like things would get stickier.

ElliotH 15y ago
" It does this adaptively and works even in full-screen programs like emacs and vim" Would imply it does work well.
a1k0n 15y ago
It seems to work just fine. The local prediction looks kind of ugly with colorcolumn enabled, though, since it assumes characters are being inserted when doing local prediction, which shifts the colored column right for each keystroke until the update comes in from the server to fix it.

invalidOrTaken 15y ago

What I find especially interesting is how they explicitly decided to design the site like a startup's. I always think it's cool when philanthropy learns from commercial enterprises.

drivebyacct2 15y ago
It's just bootstrap [1], it's a laziness/cheapness/time constraint thing, not really mimicking. [1]: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap
- elliottcarlson 15y ago
  Note that the screenshot has a listing of "ideas" for the site - including a note that says "Make it look like a fake startup company."
- antihero 15y ago
  Honestly I'm actually getting really bored and annoyed with the amount of Twitter Bootstrap sites now, that don't change themselves at all.
- alwillis 15y ago
  If it was really about laziness, cheapness or time constraints, they would have just put up a Github README and would have been done. Seems pretty clear they’re breaking with the crappy, poorly designed webpages open source software—especially anything having to do with networking or security—often have. These guys understand: how something is presented matters too; not just how well the code works.

joejohnson 15y ago

When I try to run mosh on my Mac (after installing from the .pkg provided) I get this error: Can't locate IO/Pty.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.3/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.3 /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.12.3/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.12.3 /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.12.3/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.12.3 /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl .) at /usr/bin/mosh line 24. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/bin/mosh line 24. Is anyone else getting this error?

SeoxyS 15y ago
You're using MacPort's install of Perl, instead of the OSX's default. Edit the shebang in /usr/local/bin/mosh to point to /url/bin/perl. Anyway, that did the trick for me.
joejohnson 15y ago
Never mind, the latest package (mosh-1.1.3-2.pkg) fixed it.
peterwwillis 15y ago
I found this annoying too. It's not a core Perl module so it should be listed on requirements page. And really, do we need this complicated of a perl wrapper when they already wrote a C++ client?

excerionsforte 15y ago

This actually sounds pretty sweet. I'm gonna try it on my vps! You get my upvote.

chashaz 15y ago
Ya...the features of Mosh sound quite interesting..there's been a lot of times when I forgot to quit out of my shell & had everything messed up...so had to relogin, etc. so this will certainly help. But one thing that I'm still not that sure about is the security...is mosh secure like ssh? It obviously acts as a client on top of that protocol if I'm not wrong then it should be pretty secure right?

ramidarigaz 15y ago

This looks really cool! One question. I have a firewall (ufw) that is blocking most ports (I have a small whitelist). It looks like Mosh uses a UDP port between 60000 and 61000. Is there a way to pick a port for Mosh to use, or do I have to open that range of ports? It's not a huge deal either way, but it would be cool if I could tell it to use a specific port. Oops. Nevermind. It looks like -p is what I want.

DarkShikari 15y ago

Is there any reason why Windows or at least Cygwin isn't supported? Much of the time, the whole point of SSH for me is to connect to a Unix machine from a non-Unix machine.

keithwinstein 15y ago
The code compiles under Cygwin with not too much effort -- the current master may compile. The big problem there is you don't really have a good UTF-8 terminal, but you're welcome to use it. If you know how we can best package the software for Windows or Cygwin users, we're happy to take a patch. (github.com/keithw/mosh.git)
- tedunangst 15y ago
  Start with the putty source and integrate the mosh protocol?
- nooop 15y ago
  Cygwin has a built-in utf-8 terminal that I find quite descent. (Only for some months, it did not have it before.)
  - keithwinstein 15y ago
    Just posted some more terminal geekery on http://mosh.mit.edu http://mosh.mit.edu -- I'd be interested how the Cygwin terminal does on the test cases shown there.
    - mcpherrinm 15y ago
      Those test cases look useful -- Do you know of any more sets? I'm writing a terminal emulator out of interest, in hopefully a cross-platform way. I'm personally frustrated by the existing ones. Got any wish-list items for one?
    - J_Darnley 15y ago
      Mintty, badly. The first test gives no hat (or I just can't see it). The second causes it to get stuck in heiroglyphs. The third doesn't work correctly either. It looks like it prints xyz correctly, then jumps to the second line on screen and then continues from there. The "cygwin bash shell" which uses cmd.exe does the first test correctly but similarly fails on the others.

forgotusername 15y ago

> Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It's more robust and responsive, > Mosh doesn't listen on network ports or authenticate users. The mosh client logs in to the server via SSH Umm.. > Unlike SSH, mosh's UDP-based protocol handles packet loss gracefully So it's not a replacement for SSH, but instead sits on top. Not only that, but it has some separate self-designed protocol that it uses to implement its ju-ju, presumably heavily peer reviewed for security design defects considering the claims of being an SSH replacement that are being made. :)

ezyang 15y ago
It's a replacement in the sense that, whenever you'd type 'ssh', you should type 'mosh' instead.
- wdaher 15y ago
  Exactly. It just happens to use ssh to bootstrap itself.
  - keithwinstein 15y ago
    Yeah -- we use ssh to authenticate the user and log them in and start up the mosh server (an unprivileged helper process). Then we shut down the SSH connection and establish a direct (roaming) connection over UDP.
    - zobzu 15y ago
      haskish :)
  - forgotusername 15y ago
    There are 101 million ways to screw these kinds of protocols up, that's why I'm sceptical. There are too many avenues to list, but here are a few: * Security product written in C++, leveraging 2 huge libraries (Google protocolbuffers, Boost) * One man band by the looks of it * Includes its own private crypto code (has rijndael-alg-fst.cc been vetted for timing issues?) * Implements its own private crypto protocol (has it been vetted for replay attacks? padding attacks? [insert 20 years of perplexing bugs confounding the greatest minds in computer science]?) etc. And besides all that, this page is begging you to download it. It ticks every box: sexy Bootstrap design, prepackaged installers for every OS, and not one mention of a single downside! That raises the question: what is the author's agenda? (At a guess, school cred, but still, this isn't reason enough for me to swap out something as critical as SSH)

wdaher 15y ago

I'll confess that I always run mosh with -a because it looks cooler when you see it predictively echoing text that you wouldn't otherwise get.

mmahemoff 15y ago

I'd like to see SSH optimised for touch-based user interfaces. On mobile, we're stuck with crappy touch keyboards for at least the next few years (until serious haptic feedback or to some extent voice recognition becomes feasible). I'm not even sure what it would look like. I just know that SSH right now is not a very pleasant experience.

Tossrock 15y ago
In my imagination, it would be a touch-optimized way to issue commands. By checking your history file, the program could build a library of your most used commands. So maybe you tap a pleasantly large icon representing the server you want to connect to, it does the authentication for you, and then you get a pleasantly large list of your top 10 commands (scroll down for more). You click "apachectl", and then "restart" from the sublist that pops up. Add the "sudo" modifier and then tap a final pleasantly large button to issue the command. For actual text editing, it could just drop you into something like ConnectBot or Terminal.
fusiongyro 15y ago
I'm having trouble imagining what role SSH or its replacement has in reinventing the text terminal for touch-based user interfaces. Seems like the whole idea would have to go out the window. VNC would work if the destination were also touch-based, but it's probably mouse-based, and I don't know at what level that's integrated into the protocol (probably too low).
- ryangee 15y ago
  http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/ http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/
  - fusiongyro 15y ago
    I've actually seen this before, and it is awesome, but it doesn't answer the question of how to re-imagine a text console for touch.

jimmyjim 15y ago

Pretty cool, but some of its aims can be achieved in other safer ways: * Use tmux, a multi-plexer, so you never lose the state of a program * Use KiTTY as an SSH client- http://kitty.9bis.com/ http://kitty.9bis.com/ - enable 'Reconnect' options * Configure http tunnelling if you want, it's trivially easy to set up with either Chrome or Firefox The end result: an SSH connection that's always alive when I need it to be. When I open up my laptop's lid, it reconnects automatically, and because I've set up keys (without a passphrase) I do not have to do _anything_ and I'm all good to go. You can have a tmux attach command coded and you really do not have to do a thing. Some other notes: KiTTY is a PuTTY fork, with many new extremely delicious features (hyper links, better clipboard support, etc.) To tunnel your http traffic (for when you're in a public spot and would opt for basic security): Connection > SSH > Tunnels. Add a dynamic port... and concordantly configure proxy settings on your browser's end. For Firefox you don't need any extensions... for Chrome this extension, in my experiences, is fairly decent: http://switchy.samabox.com/ http://switchy.samabox.com/ -- these directions will work for both PuTTY and KiTTY. >> SSH waits for the server's reply before showing you your own typing. That can make for a lousy user interface. Mosh is different: it gives an instant response to typing, deleting, and line editing. It does this adaptively and works even in full-screen programs like emacs and vim. If real-time text rendering is a must for you, consider TRAMP: http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ Also consider using EmacsClient: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient And for vim, apparently there's netrw: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1075 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1075

aaronblohowiak 15y ago
keys without passphrase? i hope they do not connect to a publicly available server with other people's data on it.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  If it's on OS X, keychains does a pretty good job of unlocking your (password secured) private key transparently. That's preferable to leaving your private key sitting around without a passphrase.

ezy 15y ago

Ok, I'll be "that guy". Why not just use tmux or screen? Is character delay a real issue in 2012? Seems like it's more of a proof of concept of their syncing algorithm rather than something super useful. EDIT: Fair enough, I stand corrected. :-)

nelhage 15y ago
The killer app is not actually the predictive echo, but the improved handling of lossy networks and roaming between networks. On a crappy wifi hotspot that regularly craps out for a few seconds? mosh will notice and recover the instant it comes back, whereas ssh will have a delay or may not recover at all. Suspend your laptop with an active connection and come up an hour later on a different connection? mosh will instantly restablish connection like nothing happened.
joblessjunkie 15y ago
I find character delay to be an ongoing frustration while using ssh with remote servers all day long. When I've mis-typed and need to backspace, I'm usually a couple of keystrokes ahead by the time I see it. I have to pause, wait, count, and carefully press backspace a precise number of times, and frequently get it wrong. For nearby connections, it's no big deal, but cross-continent or overseas it's a right pain.
- Florin_Andrei 15y ago
  > a right pain British English?
  - sambeau 15y ago
    Read "a right pain" as "genuinely frustrating" or "really annoying".
  - nollidge 15y ago
    Not sure why you got downvoted. Yes, that's definitely a more British construction.

redbad 15y ago

Datagrams are encrypted and authenticated using AES-128 in OCB mode. I'm curious to know more details. Does it leverage existing SSH auth infrastructure (ie. keys) for that, somehow?

keithwinstein 15y ago
Not exactly, no -- it's a new roaming secure datagram protocol. It uses SSH for the initial key _exchange_: if you run "mosh-server" by itself, you'll see it spit out a random 128-bit session key that protects the mosh session.
- marshray 15y ago
  Is the protocol documented? I've looked at DTLS and I'm wondering how you prevent replay attacks and such.
  - keithwinstein 15y ago
    It is documented in the research paper linked from the site, yeah. The big contribution with this protocol is that every authenticated datagram represents an idempotent operation on the recipient, so we don't have to worry about replay attacks as such.
    - marshray 15y ago
      I'm not sure how a terminal session can use only idempotent operations, but it sounds cool. I'll have to read the paper!

skeletonjelly 15y ago

No results for searching for "secur*" on that page. Are there any risks?

throwaway54-762 15y ago
Try searching for "aes" and "ocb".
- skeletonjelly 15y ago
  Ah thanks. Missed that in my cursory glance. I'm still curious as to the ramifications for sysadmins. SSH hardening guides have been around since forever. While this doesn't dramatically change things do you think it still needs some reliable advice on best use (static UDP ports etc)?
acqq 15y ago
I also miss a discussion of how the protocol avoid denials of service once it's assumed that the UDP comes from any address -- if every packet from any address actually has to be decrypted.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  Denial of service concerns seem to be at least briefly discussed in the paper (which I have not finished reading yet): 2 We do not prevent against a denial-of-service attack where an ac- tive attacker intercepts packets and resends them under its own IP ad- dress to fool the server’s roaming detection. Such an attack would not compromise the confidentiality of the connection but would disrupt it. (Not the same scenario as you are describing, but still.)

throwaway54-762 15y ago

Note for Fedora users: this update was only pushed to stable yesterday[0] so you may not yet see it in your local package mirror. [0]: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-5085/mosh-1.1.1-1.fc16 https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-5085/mos...

Florin_Andrei 15y ago
Is there a .src.rpm somewhere?
- achernya 15y ago
  Assuming you are running the latest Fedora, you can get the SRPM from the main Fedora Project servers: http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/updates/16/SRPMS/mosh-1.1.1-1.fc16.src.rpm http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/updates/16/SRPM... There are source and binary packages for Fedora 15, 16, the upcoming 17, and rawhide. You can configure your yum to use dl.fedoraproject.org instead of a choosing a mirror to get the latest updates, if you want.

denisu 15y ago

Am I blind or is there no way to connect to a custom ssh-port (other than 22) for the initial connection yet? edit: github-issue: https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/103 https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/103

glesica 15y ago
I've browsed through the site and installed to look at the man page to find this out. I can't see a way to do this. Makes it useless for me :-( Not that I'm complaining. It's not like I'm being asked to pay for it, just a feature that I imagine would be helpful to many people...
- keithwinstein 15y ago
  Thanks, we're working on it and it will be in a future release. We're tracking this issue at https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/53 https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/53
denisu 15y ago
A workaround for this is to change the ssh default port in your ssh config file.
wnoise 15y ago
In .ssh/config: Host alias Hostname realname.domain Port alternate_port

za 15y ago

related - Rocks: Reliable Sockets (unmaintained) http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~zandy/rocks/ http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~zandy/rocks/

ComputerGuru 15y ago

Note (for keithwinstein?): mosh doesn't handle iftop output properly. It may be that iftop abuses UTF8 or takes advantage of a bug to print certain characters, but it's not working right with mosh.

keithwinstein 15y ago
Thanks. The quick fix is to run "LANG=C luit iftop" instead. More detail: The problem is that we've made a design decision not to honor ISO 2022 locking escape sequences (which can be used as line-drawing characters), because they can end up sticking the terminal in permanent hieroglyphs and UTF-8 is supposed to be a stateless, self-synchronizing encoding. (See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#term http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#term for more detail than you probably want, or the examples I just added to mosh.mit.edu.) We use the NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1 environment variable to request UTF-8 from ncurses instead of ISO 2022, and 99% of programs honor that -- but iftop is not one of them. It's within its rights, but I think these programs are rare enough that if you want to use the old-style line-drawing characters in mosh, it would be better to run just that program in luit (which is a translator), so that at least when luit exits, you'll be out of hieroglyphs for sure.
- ComputerGuru 15y ago
  No go. "LANG=C luit iftop" in mosh or a normal shell is the same result as running iftop in mosh. http://cl.ly/423P2B0u212B0k3j0g0X http://cl.ly/423P2B0u212B0k3j0g0X vs http://cl.ly/0M3f0o2c0O243v3z1N0W http://cl.ly/0M3f0o2c0O243v3z1N0W

mock 15y ago

I wonder how easy it would be to hook this up to dns tunneling software such as http://code.kryo.se/iodine/ http://code.kryo.se/iodine/ in such a way that after the the initial ssh auth step, you would have a useful terminal that would be accessible even behind captive portals and the like?

achernya 15y ago
I've used mosh over iodine, by simply having the iodine-server forward all of my packets via IPv4 NAT. I then set my client gateway to use dns0 instead of eth0. Works great!

ggchappell 15y ago

Do I understand correctly: to use mosh, I must have mosh-server available on the remote machine (?).

sinosc 15y ago
»Then Mosh runs the mosh-server remotely and connects to it over UDP« i.e. yes
bostonvaulter2 15y ago
Shouldn't it be possible to install the mosh-server over the network from the client machine. Similar to what sshuttle does?
mellifluousmind 15y ago
The documentation doesn't say this, but apparently, after you start mosh-server, it dies if there is no incoming request within 60 seconds. What is the point of the server if it is just going to quit after 60 seconds?
- charliesome 15y ago
  mosh-server is started up by mosh-client when it first SSH's in

stevejb 15y ago

This looks fantastic and seems like a very much needed part of the ssh ecosystem. Most of my work is sshing from my home computer to servers in the cloud, and this seems like it will be perfect for mitigating the feeling of lag.

philipithomas 15y ago

Intriguing, but I feel that most of the efficiency problems it tries to overcome can be mostly remedied by key-based SSH access. Can anyone comment on this?

ef4 15y ago
It's solving a completely different problem. In fact it doesn't change SSH's authentication at all, so you'd still use your existing ssh key.

Scaevolus 15y ago

I wish this used CurveCP.

zhuzhuor 15y ago

ocb is patented... although the author claims it is "currently" free for gpl code. What are you guys thinking? At least only supporting one protocol is not that good.

djmdjm 15y ago
I was very surprised at the use of OCB and not one of the other more widely-used authenticated encryption modes like EAX or GCM.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nwmcsween 15y ago

Ok so is the authentication pluggable (authorization I'm presuming is handled by pam and such)? Can I use Kerberos instead of SSH?

rman666 15y ago

(funny/sarcastic joke about Mosh Pit)

st3fan 15y ago

Note to self: "brew install mosh" installs a scheme implementation. Install mobile-shell instead.

aq11 15y ago

Nice enough idea; but having protobuf and boost as deps is just silly for a system utility.

kirpekar 15y ago

No X11 kills the deal for me.

lfaraone 15y ago
You can run X11 in a separate terminal? Anyway, doing network-resilient X11 is a harder problem than just ttys.

lisnake 15y ago

Does it have -R option like ssh, for port forwarding inside ssh session? Otherwise, I won't be able to connect to my work machines behind very strict firewall

tiernano 15y ago

wasent Mosh the name of Powershell before it became PowerShell? Monad was the code name, MOSH (MOnad SHell) was a name for it too...

joliss 15y ago

I'm scared to trust Mosh with my connection security, but the local echo sounds awesome. What happens if I tunnel my Mosh connection through SSH? Will I still get all the features (except for roaming, obviously)?

guan 15y ago
Mosh sends its payload data through UDP, which you cannot tunnel through SSH.

peterwwillis 15y ago

Well shit. My VPS's glibc version does not have 64 bit byte-swapping functions, so I can't compile mosh for my platform. =( Can the authors update their requirements to list glibc 2.9 and perl IO::Pty module if they're compiling it themselves? Edit: I hacked the swapping functions into mosh and built it, but my system lacks a UTF-8 locale, according to mosh (even after I copied an en_US.utf8 locale to the system). Not sure how to proceed

sgt 15y ago

When connecting (for the first time) to a mosh server I get the following error message: /usr/bin/mosh: Did not find mosh server startup message. <it then disconnects> Server runs FreeBSD and the client is OS X. Any ideas?

wdaher 15y ago
Is mosh installed on the server? If you just normally ssh to the server and run "mosh-server", does it actually do something? (maybe it's not in your PATH?)
- sgt 15y ago
  It's in my PATH. If I do that, this happens: freebsd$ mosh-server MOSH CONNECT 60001 cPiSdaPVTjKA/JQjy5jExg mosh-server (mosh 1.1.3) Copyright 2012 Keith Winstein <mosh-devel@mit.edu> License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. [mosh-server detached, pid = 2751] Warning: termios IUTF8 flag not defined. Character-erase of multibyte character sequence probably does not work properly on this platform. However back on the OS X desktop, if I do the following: osx$ export MOSH_KEY=cPiSdaPVTjKA/JQjy5jExg osx$ mosh-client 18.4.12.5 60001 <it now starts connecting, but server side complains "Crypto exception: Packet failed integrity check.">

Arubis 15y ago

For specific use cases this is an absolute lifesaver. I live a bit away from "normal" internet connections and will often go days without access to better than a weak GPRS signal. Being able to reliably issue commands without stabbing myself waiting for local echo/reinitiating the connection a dozen times/thinking about my AWS credit slipping away makes this something I would pay to use.

jongraehl 15y ago

Nice homage in the terminal window (Mosh Web Site Ideas) to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Important_Things_with_Demetri_Martin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Important_Things_with_Demetri_M... :)

ricardobeat 15y ago

Is it usable behind NAT/firewalls, as an alternative to a reverse tunnel?

markus2012 14y ago

I've used mosh for about 10 days. It's worked perfectly for me. I disconnect/re-connect my laptop quite a bit between work/home/meeting rooms/hotels. My mosh sessions have lived through it all. I haven't had to restart or reconnect it once. I'd send feedback directly to the mosh folks, but I have to subscribe to do so. A general thought for any project: please make it easy for folks to provide feedback.