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Mosh: The Mobile Shell

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Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#101

Post by j1elo »

yason wrote: post #83
keithwinstein wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the truth is that we don't feel like we need a release. We've never had a security hole, our track record speaks for itself, and I wouldn't really want us to rush anything and blow that. There are some features that it would be really nice to have in a release (like 24-bit color support, and working around a recent MacOS clock bug), but I handed over the maintainership to somebody else about six years ago and…

Thanks much and keep the same heading please! I really enjoy using tools that have matured and become good enough that there's no longer any major need for new features — and where nothing is added just for the sake of "improvement". I personally haven't had a single thing in Mosh I would've wanted to add to it, and I'm glad nothing has been added either. A lot of Unix tools are like that. They do what they were writ…

I concur, but at the same time have a counterpoint. It always trips me how I can user Perl regex for powerful searching in grep, but then these are somehow not available in sed. The Extended syntax it has is not the same, still too verbose in comparison

Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#102

Post by notorandit »

It's a neat solution, indeed. But is that actually viable and useful? Not sure. First, you need to open firewalls to UDP port ranges. Second, you still need SSH to be in place and reachable. Third, as soon as you kick off mosh you loose all bells and whistles by SSH (like TCP forwarders, SOCKS proxies etc.).

So my idea is: nice for amateur small infrastructures, pretty useless for real world (cloud) infras. Maybe you can make mosh-reachable a bastion or two, but no more than that.

Nonetheless, i stress, it's a neat idea.

Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#103

Post by codetrotter »

gnyman wrote: post #87
d4l3k wrote: post #50

Adding port forwarding to Mosh has a $600 bounty -- highest OSS bounty I've ever seen https://www.bountysource.com/issues/4471419-ssh-port-forward... https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/337

there is a fork with port forwarding support https://github.com/rinne/mosh and a PR with a long discussion https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/pull/696 on why it's not merged you can compile them yourself or if you want to skip the step I recently set up GitHub actions to compile linux binaries of this [1][2], tested by a sample of 1 so no guarantees it works, was planning on doing a tap PR/tap of it at some point a…

> a PR with a long discussion https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/pull/696 on why it's not merged

I'm confused. I read the whole thing but couldn't find the specific reason for why it's not been merged. But I assume it's because of the things that were pointed out in the code review comments?

Also, the issue you linked is about SSH Agent forwarding, not port forwarding.

Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#104

Post by codetrotter »

d4l3k wrote: post #50

Adding port forwarding to Mosh has a $600 bounty -- highest OSS bounty I've ever seen https://www.bountysource.com/issues/4471419-ssh-port-forward... https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/337

As someone that used to use SSH port forwarding, I have a recommendation that may be a suitable alternative to the lack of port forwarding in Mosh, as well as being an alternative to port forwarding over SSH. Wireguard! This is what I do instead of port forwarding over SSH since quite a while back now.

I run a Wireguard VPN on a VPS, and have machines connect to that VPN. This allows me to reach the machines on the VPN from almost anywhere in the world. Recently I changed the port that Wireguard is listening on to port 443 UDP, which also allows me to connect to my VPN from a few public WLANs that are very restrictive on which ports they allow outbound traffic to.

Wireguard is super easy to configure and run, and very secure.

Definitely give Wireguard a go. It's open source and awesome.

Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#105

Post by [deleted] »

notorandit wrote: post #102

It's a neat solution, indeed. But is that actually viable and useful? Not sure. First, you need to open firewalls to UDP port ranges. Second, you still need SSH to be in place and reachable. Third, as soon as you kick off mosh you loose all bells and whistles by SSH (like TCP forwarders, SOCKS proxies etc.). So my idea is: nice for amateur small infrastructures, pretty useless for real world (cloud) infras. Maybe you…

[deleted]

Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#106

Post by tmsbrg »

gorgoiler wrote: post #69

Local echo always felt like a handy feature for any kind of laggy terminal app, not just ssh / mosh. I imagine such a tool would emulate a terminal a la screen / tmux, and just print what you type until the underlying program outputs to stdout, at which point it undoes what you typed and replays the stdout? I realise I may be betraying a complete lack of understanding of how Unix terminals actually work :) Is there a…

Hmm, rlwrap[0] is a really nice tool when working with applications that are poor at handling terminal input. It basically handles your keystrokes in rlwrap and whenever you type enter it will send the input line to the application to handle. It's very useful also for application that don't have their own input handling (arrow keys, etc.) or have extreme keystroke latency. It will even give you ctrl+r feature to search commands you typed earlier.

I use it often for pentesting when getting a raw reverse shell. I'll get access to a remote bash session through netcat, and using rlwrap I can do the line editing locally and find the complex commands I've written before without copypaste.

[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/rlwrap

Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#107

Post by flyinghamster »

Trying to use SSH via LTE over a mobile phone hotspot was downright horrible. It took ridiculous keepalive settings and a separate window pinging the destination to make it even halfway usable.

Then someone on another HN thread mentioned mosh. That was just what the doctor ordered. It's something I've wished I knew about years ago, given that it's also useful when Wi-Fi gets dodgy.

Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#108

Post by bombcar »

keithwinstein wrote: post #48
bombcar wrote: post #21

mosh is basically a proof of concept as a college project - it is missing Unicode and ssh-agent forwarding which may be significant for some. Otherwise it works decently well for what it does. For many screen and normal ssh will do the job.

Re: Unicode, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28151652 . (Mosh really just uses your C library for knowing the width of characters -- if the server's and client's libc support a character, Mosh will too. Unfortunately Apple in particular has historically been not super-great about keeping theirs up-to-date once Unicode went to an annual release cycle. screen and tmux have similar issues and basically s…

Maybe it was guardian-agent that was the college prototype. I could never figure out how to get it to work.

Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#109

Post by flyinghamster »

foxpurple wrote: post #32
dang wrote: post #2

Some past threads: Blink Mobile Shell for iOS (Mosh Based) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370348 - Nov 2018 (1 comment) Mosh: the mobile shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429203 - Sept 2016 (49 comments) Mosh: the mobile shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572146 - April 2016 (148 comments) Mosh – a robust, responsive replacement for SSH - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928506…

The title “Mosh: SSH for 2012” is amusing because now in 2021, ssh is still king.

In general, I prefer SSH when using reliable, low-latency links, mainly because of the various forwarding capabilities (agent, X11, ports), and sometimes because I need my output to be sequential. But for any kind of situation where the link might be dodgy, mosh is king.

Re: Mosh: The Mobile Shell

#110

Post by goodpoint »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #59
keithwinstein wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the truth is that we don't feel like we need a release. We've never had a security hole, our track record speaks for itself, and I wouldn't really want us to rush anything and blow that. There are some features that it would be really nice to have in a release (like 24-bit color support, and working around a recent MacOS clock bug), but I handed over the maintainership to somebody else about six years ago and…

I don’t use mosh myself as I thought the project had been abandoned, but I know several folks that love it. Just want to thank you on their behalf. Also, I appreciate knowing you all are watching PRs and bug reports even if you don’t see the need to take action. Makes me feel the project is just dormant and not abandoned. If you care about continued use and adoption, you might consider posting an update to the websit…

I would not call a working and usable piece of software "abandoned".

We should call it "completed".

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