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Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

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Re: Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

#21

Post by tracker1 »

perbu wrote: post #17

Well done. The ease of use and high quality of the Go SSH libraries (golang.org/x/crypto/ssh) is a killer feature of Go, imho. Also, there is a high level abstraction, github.com/gliderlabs/ssh, which makes it completely trivial to embed an ssh server into an application, giving you a nice way to inspect counters and flip feature flags and tuneables.

Definitely... first became roughly aware of it with the doorparty connector service[1]. Which is a niche fit, but definitely was cool to see how it worked.

1. https://github.com/echicken/dpc2/

Re: Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

#22

Post by jaimehrubiks »

This looks so good! I have two questions

1. What happens if the tunnels breaks? Does it retry instantly? Is there any sort of exponential backlog time? Just wondering if the server is down, if it would spike the cpu or would be gentle (while still fast enough)

2. Would you be adding support for Socks Proxy? The ssh command is quite simple, and it is as useful as regular remote and local tunnels.

Re: Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

#23

Post by evanelias »

perbu wrote: post #17

Well done. The ease of use and high quality of the Go SSH libraries (golang.org/x/crypto/ssh) is a killer feature of Go, imho. Also, there is a high level abstraction, github.com/gliderlabs/ssh, which makes it completely trivial to embed an ssh server into an application, giving you a nice way to inspect counters and flip feature flags and tuneables.

The only major downside to golang.org/x/crypto/ssh is that open issues seem to linger for years lately, even when people try to submit patches. So it's often necessary to look for third-party solutions.

The knownhosts handling in particular has a bunch of common land-mines. I'm the maintainer of a wrapper package https://github.com/skeema/knownhosts/ which solves some of them, without having to re-implement the core knownhosts logic from x/crypto/ssh.

Just to illustrate how common these land-mines are, my wrapper package is imported by 8000 other repos on GitHub, although most of these are indirect dependencies: https://github.com/skeema/knownhosts/network/dependents

Re: Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

#24

Post by tracker1 »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #20
sevg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not quite. XDG-compliant programs end up storing stuff in one or more of the following places: ~/.cache and ~/.config and ~/.local/share and ~/.local/state and ~/.local/bin I used to get annoyed by non-compliance to XDG. Now I wonder if I'd actually prefer apps to reverse the hierarchy (eg, ~/.apps/nvim/{cache,config,state}).

I find it obnoxious when apps make me hunt for all of their cache directories. Just put all the cache data in one place. Make it clear what needs to be backed up, what is ephemeral, and so on. Just put everything in ~/.cache. Chromium in particular is bad at this and has many types of cache.

That's where I would probably split myself... ~/.cache/appname for cache data, and ~/.???/appname/* for everything else.

This is a huge part of why I like docker-compose and docker in general, I can put everything I need to backup in a set of volume maps next to each other.

Re: Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

#27

Post by 0x12A »

jaimehrubiks wrote: post #22

This looks so good! I have two questions 1. What happens if the tunnels breaks? Does it retry instantly? Is there any sort of exponential backlog time? Just wondering if the server is down, if it would spike the cpu or would be gentle (while still fast enough) 2. Would you be adding support for Socks Proxy? The ssh command is quite simple, and it is as useful as regular remote and local tunnels.

Thank you! Yes, there is an exponential backoff strategy for reconnection attempts. Supporting SOCKS sounds like a nice idea, I'll look into it!

Re: Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

#28

Post by [deleted] »

evanelias wrote: post #23
perbu wrote: post #17

Well done. The ease of use and high quality of the Go SSH libraries (golang.org/x/crypto/ssh) is a killer feature of Go, imho. Also, there is a high level abstraction, github.com/gliderlabs/ssh, which makes it completely trivial to embed an ssh server into an application, giving you a nice way to inspect counters and flip feature flags and tuneables.

The only major downside to golang.org/x/crypto/ssh is that open issues seem to linger for years lately, even when people try to submit patches. So it's often necessary to look for third-party solutions. The knownhosts handling in particular has a bunch of common land-mines. I'm the maintainer of a wrapper package https://github.com/skeema/knownhosts/ which solves some of them, without having to re-implement the core…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

#29

Post by wrs »

perbu wrote: post #16
madeforhnyo wrote: post #4

Nice project! I would advise to use $XDG_CONFIG_HOME instead of $HOME for storing the configuration file though :)

Is XDG_CONFIG_HOME Unix? Isn't it just some Linux convention?

XDG = X (pronounced “cross”) Desktop Group, aka freedesktop.org, promulgator of conventions for desktop apps.

So, neither one really.

Re: Show HN: I made an SSH tunnel manager to learn Go

#30

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

evanelias wrote: post #23
perbu wrote: post #17

Well done. The ease of use and high quality of the Go SSH libraries (golang.org/x/crypto/ssh) is a killer feature of Go, imho. Also, there is a high level abstraction, github.com/gliderlabs/ssh, which makes it completely trivial to embed an ssh server into an application, giving you a nice way to inspect counters and flip feature flags and tuneables.

The only major downside to golang.org/x/crypto/ssh is that open issues seem to linger for years lately, even when people try to submit patches. So it's often necessary to look for third-party solutions. The knownhosts handling in particular has a bunch of common land-mines. I'm the maintainer of a wrapper package https://github.com/skeema/knownhosts/ which solves some of them, without having to re-implement the core…

I think in an ideal world, this would be the normal case. A hierarchy of packages, maintained by many independent parties, that extend useful base functionality, without too much logic being put in any one package. If one thing doesn't work well you can just create a new package to replace the one part. And building on top of simpler, smaller modules allows you to keep code DRY, reduce maintenance burden (like the 1000 open PRs...), and easily extend functionality by simply making a new package.

That was my experience with CPAN, anyway. It's not perfect but it's miles above other language module cultures.

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