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Re: [LUG] MOSH

 

On 21/08/13 16:04, Martijn Grooten wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Aug 2013, Simon wrote:
>> Anyone out there using Mosh? Am I right and thinking it's a
>> replacement for ssh/screen? I've not had a chance to look at the site
>> yet as believe it or not it's blocked at work http://mosh.mit.edu
>
> Last year I wrote that it mostly solved problems I don't have:
>
> http://www.dcglug.org.uk/archive/2012/04/msg00078.html
>
> I still think that's the case, but I've never tried it, and I'd
> happily be convinced otherwise.
>
> Martijn.
>
>

I've looked into it, mostly for it's keep-alive connection abilities -
originally I'd intended to roll it out *everywhere* if it could live up
to it's promise, but it just doesn't. I do still use it a little bit on
flaky wifi connections and from mobile devices if I'm roaming about and
desperately trying to maintain a connection. Sadly it just didn't cut it
for just putting it on every single ssh endpoint I control. Also had
problems getting it functional on stock Debian, which is never a good
sign...

Interesting that you ran into something I consider critical as well -
Emacs until you hit a trashed machine and had to work with a massively
reduced, probably statically linked emergency shell. Now I'm not a big
fan of Emacs - partly because it's just not my cup of tea, partly
because it's an unholy sprawling bloated monstrosity but mainly for
practical reasons. I spend a lot of time in disaster recovery mode with
nodes booted to sash (SGI standalone shell), init 1 (Solaris, AIX,
Linux) or various other states of disrepair and no matter what, even if
I've only got a statically linked emergency/rescue shell running, I can
get /bin/sh and /bin/vi functional. And with those I can fix most
anything. Good luck getting Emacs functional in those environments to
rebuild a knackered /etc file, a Grub record, etc.

As much as I like flame wars I'm not getting into Vi vs Emacs in depth -
just as a sysadmin, vi is a lot smaller, is installed *everywhere* by
default (I'm talking proper vi here, I've never even used vim) and once
you know it's weird syntax and shortcuts, is incredibly powerful. I'm
sure Emacs is great but it's not going on any of my custom rescue
images, that's for sure (it would probably double their size, just for a
start).

I also wanted to include tcpdump/nmap (although I prefer Wireshark for
traffic analysis if possible) as well, but thought I'd try and keep it
to a neat 5.

Regards

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