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Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

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21–30 of 105 posts

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#21
I'm confused and have a couple questions:

1. Why would I want someone to ssh into my machine -- at least with the frequency that a service to help me do it is valuable?

2. How is this easier/better than saying 'hey bro whats your ssh pub id? -- eh.. do `cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub`

Over all this seems like a tool that only super technical people would ever use, and for those people adding a key to authorized keys is trivial.

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#22
post #21

I'm confused and have a couple questions: 1. Why would I want someone to ssh into my machine -- at least with the frequency that a service to help me do it is valuable? 2. How is this easier/better than saying 'hey bro whats your ssh pub id? -- eh.. do `cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub` Over all this seems like a tool that only super technical people would ever use, and for those people adding a key to authorized keys is trivia…

Yeah, "just share the Teleconsole ID" seems like an identical step to "just share the public key".

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#24
post #21

I'm confused and have a couple questions: 1. Why would I want someone to ssh into my machine -- at least with the frequency that a service to help me do it is valuable? 2. How is this easier/better than saying 'hey bro whats your ssh pub id? -- eh.. do `cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub` Over all this seems like a tool that only super technical people would ever use, and for those people adding a key to authorized keys is trivia…

The only use case I can think of would be helping family with their linux install... and if this is already installed on their machines, it was probably put there by me... just as easy for me to put my ssh pubkeys on there too.

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#25
Another way, using only software that you have already: get your friends' public keys and make a burner account on any jointly-reachable server/laptop/whatever and do a follow-the-leader screen:

http://blog.endpoint.com/2009/09/gnu-screen-follow-leader.ht...

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#28
post #23

What kind of abuse prevention measures does this have in place? As it stands it looks like a super convenient way to scp garbage into other people's computers and I'm not sure I'm sold on that.

Zero. It's an instant self-configuring SSH server, so the prevention measures are similar as with OpenSSH: if you don't want garbage on your computer, do not add public keys of malicious strangers into your `~/.ssh/authorized_keys` and do not open port 22 to the world! So with Teleconsole, don't invite people you don't trust. :)

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#29
I suppose this is useful if you have two systems both behind NAT...

I've run into many situations where I'm remote and need to SSH into a NATed machine to fix something, and I typically will SSH reverse tunnel to a VPS.

From the NATed machine:

    ssh -fN -R52222:localhost:22 user@publichost
And then from the public machine:

    ssh user@localhost -p 52222

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#30
Hmm. Seems like all traffic goes through a central proxy server.

Shouldn't it be possible to use the central server only for hole-punching and implement a TCP-over-UDP connection so that the clients can directly communicate with each other? (And don't the major browser vendors already have public NAT-hole-punchers for WebRTC?)

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