new SSH depends prevent leaks

November 27, 2007 11:31 AM

What common unix apps have built-in support for tunneling over ssh, besides rsync?

rsync has the -e flag that lets you specify ssh for the remote shell, which is supposed to secure your rsync connection.

What other common unix commands have built-in ties to ssh like that? I am aware of SSH's flags for forwarding X and generic ports, I'm more interested in applications/tools that make assumptions about being able to interact with the installed SSH.

posted by nomisxid to computers & internet (7 comments total)

vncviewer does, with the -via switch.
posted by zsazsa at 11:40 AM on November 27, 2007

CVS, Subversion, and probably many other version control systems. Emacs TrampMode.
posted by grouse at 11:58 AM on November 27, 2007

You can mount remote directories with it in Nautilus and use the files like they're local. I access my music share all over my home LAN and even externally.

ssh://server.name/media/music/
posted by cdmwebs at 12:41 PM on November 27, 2007

IIRC zsh can (assuming ssh-agent is setup with keys for passwordless login) be made to use ssh to autocomplete the remote path part of an scp command, among other things. I still use bash, though.

Vim's netrw plugin does scp and SFTP, but I think letting the whole system connect using the FUSE sshfs makes more sense.

The -e option to rsync was for rsh before ssh, and I think a lot of old unix programs have ways of specifying which rsh command should be used. For instance, using pppd's pty option, you can specify a command "to be used to communicate rather than a specific terminal device", which (using ssh) can make a type of vpn.
posted by finite at 1:14 PM on November 27, 2007

finite: bash_completion will enable the same scp completion feature in bash.
posted by grouse at 1:31 PM on November 27, 2007

This can be a pretty big brainfsck if you really understand it, but most pipelines could span any number of machines.

The third parameter to "ssh" is a command to run there.

$ grep nomi /usr/share/dict/american-english |ssh falme fgrep ee |ssh calliope wc -l
4

That's a pipeline that spans across three machines. "grep" on the local host, "fgrep" on falme, and "wc" on calliope. This is a silly example, but it's amazingly powerful.
posted by cmiller at 1:46 PM on November 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

On the pipeline note, a more realistic one that I use sometimes looks like this:

tar cf - somedir someotherdir | ssh tar xf -

Or the other direction. It's faster than scp on large filesets and less confusing than rsync.
posted by easyasy3k at 10:50 PM on November 28, 2007