[HN Gopher] Mosh: An Interactive Remote Shell for Mobile Clients...
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Mosh: An Interactive Remote Shell for Mobile Clients (2012) [pdf]
Author : tosh
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-11-23 09:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mosh.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mosh.org)
| Kilenaitor wrote:
| Used to like mosh but have since switched over to Eternal
| Terminal[1] and will never go back. The scrollback alone is
| awesome.
|
| [1]: https://eternalterminal.dev/
| loeg wrote:
| I run screen inside my mosh sessions which provides scrollback,
| among other features. (Tmux is another option.) ET is also a
| great solution, but I happen to need screen or something like
| it for its other features anyway.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Did they disable the telemetry? Last time I checked, you needed
| to compile it yourself to get rid of that.
|
| Not a fan of telemetry in secure shell tools.
| jw_cook wrote:
| The first message I get when starting it up:
| Eternal Terminal collects crashes and errors in order to help
| us improve your experience. The data collected is
| anonymous. You can opt-out of telemetry by setting
| the environment variable ET_NO_TELEMETRY to any non-empty
| value.
| d5ve wrote:
| I've been using mosh since it was announced, but I periodically
| try Eternal Terminal.
|
| However I havent ever managed to get ET running on Amazon Linux
| which all my AWS EC2 instances run. I've tried compiling,
| docker, app images and nothing has worked.
| jw_cook wrote:
| Just checked this out, and the scrollback feature looks great.
|
| I'd like to try this out, but am I understanding correctly that
| this needs to be installed on the server side as well as the
| client? That seems like a fairly large limitation compared to
| mosh.
| reubenmorais wrote:
| Mosh also needs to be installed on the server.
| jw_cook wrote:
| Ah, you're right, I misunderstood. Thanks!
| mattjaynes wrote:
| Somewhat related...
|
| On Wireguard's homepage[1] it says "[Wireguard] is even capable
| of roaming between IP addresses, just like Mosh. There is no need
| to manage connections, be concerned about state, manage daemons,
| or worry about what's under the hood."
|
| Has anyone been using Wireguard as a successful Mosh replacement?
| Would love to hear your experience.
|
| [1] https://www.wireguard.com/
|
| Edit: added link
| jchw wrote:
| It doesn't really fully replace mosh since it doesn't do any of
| the perceptual lag reduction, but I do use SSH over Wireguard
| and it is fairly stable. It can indeed survive roaming.
| toxik wrote:
| It kinda works, but mosh reconnects on failure regardless of
| how long time has passed. Since WG is a layer below, the TCP
| connection eventually gets reset. It is a huge difference. Also
| mosh works around lag by local echo, no such thing in WG.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Why local echo is useful?
|
| If I'm expecting echo, it does not add anything useful to my
| experience. I'm not waiting for every typed character to
| appear on my screen before I type next one.
|
| If I'm expecting data from the server (say I'm searching
| through shell history), it might even make my experience
| worse because of flickering between local and then remote
| state.
|
| I'm regularly working with 100-200 ms latency servers where
| latency is noticeable. Improving my perceptual latency was
| never something I want.
|
| Better approach is to use client/server software. Like
| vscode. Of course it's out of capabilities of terminal
| emulator and rather requires full rethinking of the entire
| shell architecture. But at least it would be meaningful
| improvement. Like I'm typing first character in shell history
| search, server transfers all 100 matched lines to the client
| and now my client can further filter this list without any
| server hops.
| asah wrote:
| Love it but ran into a problem running multiple mosh connections
| in different windows, which i lounge for keeping things separate.
|
| Any suggestions?
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| One issue that Mosh doesn't handle well bad lag/high latency.
| It's great for automatically reconnecting if you have a flaky
| connection, but it actually makes a slow connection into a worse
| experience because the local terminal isn't matching the remote
| session.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Mosh has been sort of semi-neglected in a while - they did merge
| PRs, but did not release stable in years - but very recently,
| they started releasing new versions again.
|
| I love to use it when I can.
| dundarious wrote:
| Truecolor support was added in the recent 1.4 release which is
| quite nice.
| jbj wrote:
| I have been using mosh on and off, and actually appreciated
| that the software was so robust that it just works without
| frequent updates, and as far as I understand, most security is
| in ssh, so there would not really be a need for a new version.
| loeg wrote:
| Your understanding is sort of mistaken. Mosh does an initial
| handshake over ssh, but after that it's a custom UDP
| protocol. There have been and could be more security bugs in
| that UDP protocol.
| jbj wrote:
| Ahh, thanks for clarifying! Yes, in that case it is very
| appreciated to see recent updates.
| achernya wrote:
| The only mosh CVE [1] was in the terminal emulator (a DoS
| that could only be triggered by a local user), not in the
| protocol. There have been no vulnerabilities in mosh's UDP
| protocol.
|
| [1] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2012-2385
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| _yet_.
|
| I wonder if anyone's thrown a fuzzer at it.
| achernya wrote:
| Yes, mosh has fuzz tests in oss-fuzz [1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/google/oss-
| fuzz/tree/master/projects/mosh
| yoavm wrote:
| Semi-related: I built Muxile so you can connect to your running
| Tmux instance through your mobile.
| https://github.com/bjesus/muxile
| ilovecaching wrote:
| I wish I could use mosh, but unfortunately it can't use ProxyJump
| to tunnel through a bastion host which is how I always use SSH,
| which makes sense as it's use Proxy commands itself.
| loeg wrote:
| Mosh runs directly over UDP, and that's sort of essential to
| how it works, which is why it can't run through a (SSH + TCP)
| proxy host.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| There is a way [1] but the first hop will be ssh/tcp which
| may defeat the point of doing this if the first hop has high
| loss or the IP changes constantly. ncat from nmap can also be
| used within SSH vs their suggested fifo method. Both have
| some caveats. Here [2] is some further discussion.
|
| [1] - https://superuser.com/questions/53103/udp-traffic-
| through-ss...
|
| [2] - https://teddit.sethforprivacy.com/r/linuxadmin/comments
| /xeqp...
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah, I think that defeats much of the purpose of using
| mosh. :)
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Agreed. I think the only use cases would be that your
| fist hop is stable but you want to proxy to another
| region over a lossy link but I can't imagine that would
| be very common. Maybe when using a satellite link or a
| inter-continental connection has a single over-saturated
| link but that would be a very fringe case. Perhaps when
| Starlink gets over-subscribed that could be a case.
| rollcat wrote:
| I have very mixed feelings about bastion hosts in general. It
| usually feels like moving the problem around, eventually you
| end up adding even more complexity just to do your job.
| Wireguard (or Zerotier/Tailscale, depending on your threat
| model) might end up being simpler. Complex is the enemy of
| secure - if it's hard to use, then it's easy to make a mistake.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Mosh: The Mobile Shell_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28150287 - Aug 2021 (153
| comments)
|
| _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 (147
| comments)
|
| _Mosh - a robust, responsive replacement for SSH_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928506 - Jan 2015 (45
| comments)
|
| _Mosh: A replacement for SSH_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252093 - Sept 2014 (122
| comments)
|
| _Mosh (mobile shell)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6321474 - Sept 2013 (6
| comments)
|
| _Mosh: the mobile shell_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745 - Jan 2013 (89
| comments)
|
| _Mosh: the mobile shell_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4588239 - Sept 2012 (1
| comment)
|
| _Mosh: SSH for 2012_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382 - April 2012 (193
| comments)
| dimator wrote:
| I gave mosh a shot on a whim, and it's just magic. The only time
| I have to re-run it is when the client is powered down.
| Otherwise, I've had a rock solid remote terminal for _months_ ,
| surviving VPN and network finickyness.
| toxik wrote:
| I wish tmux -CC worked as well as mosh did. I really prefer tmux
| as native GUI widgets.
| jrullman wrote:
| I've had great success using "tmux -CC" / iTerm's native
| integration with EternalTerminal.
| toxik wrote:
| I forgot why but I installed ET (painstakingly by creating a
| Gentoo ebuild and RC scripts...) then realized I don't want
| it. I wish I could remember why.
|
| Do you then go et server tmux -CC?
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