
Mosh: the mobile shell - nichodges
https://mosh.org/
======
seba_dos1
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572146)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928506)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252093)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745)

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insaneirish
As a side note, Keith Winstein
([https://cs.stanford.edu/~keithw/](https://cs.stanford.edu/~keithw/)), the
creator of mosh, is an interesting guy (e.g. he used to be a WSJ reporter
among other things).

I had the pleasure of seeing him speak at a conference last year on the topic
of TCP congestion control algorithms. I admit, I expected it to be a boring
presentation, but was then thrilled as it was one of the most dynamic,
informative, and funny technical talks I've ever seen.

That particular presentation isn't online, but he links to several others on
similar topics. I would check them out. They're probably pretty good!

~~~
berbc
His presentation "Transport Architectures for an Evolving Internet" could be
the one you're referring to? It's online and very interesting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsCOVF0vDe8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsCOVF0vDe8).

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shocks
A great bit of kit, but totally unusable for me because of a lack of agent
fowarding support[1]. :(

1: [https://github.com/mobile-
shell/mosh/issues/120](https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/120)

~~~
d33
Why would you need agent forwarding? It's a really dangerous feature.

~~~
jstanley
It's useful in a corporate environment where you have tens to hundreds of
machines you need to use, and all of them are trusted.

EDIT: "a really dangerous feature" is accurate though. For example if all of
the staff have root access on a staging machine, then anybody can steal the
ssh-agent of another user on the staging machine, and use it to login as that
user on production machines.

~~~
4ad
In such an environment you should be using Kerberos. Then you won't need agent
forwarding, and you can maintain security.

I would argue that in such an environment you really should be using
LDAP+Kerberos, but if you think LDAP is too much effort (it really isn't),
plain Kerberos is comparatively trivial to administer, and adding Kerberos
(unlike LDAP) doesn't really require any significant changes to your
environment.

~~~
brians
Why is Kerberos ticket forwarding better than agent forwarding? Either way,
root (or a bad .bashrc) can use your credentials while you're logged in.

~~~
4ad
Sorry. You are absolutely right. Long day...

I disable Kerberos ticket forwarding here, for this exact same reason. But
then you don't have ticket forwarding! I don't know what I was thinking.

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okket
Testing mosh made me aware how much I am relying on the port forwarding
feature in ssh in my daily work, and how hard it is to replace it.

Otherwise: Great tool.

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qwertyuiop924
Mosh is possibly the most useful piece of software that I've seen: it makes
remote links over slow, unreliable networks bearable for doing Real Work.
Speaking as somebody who usually has two rubbish networks between the computer
I'm on, and the conputer I'm connecting to, that's incredibly useful.

~~~
musicmatze
Absolutely. I'm using it for two or years or something by now and the very
first thing I do when having a new host: install the mosh server.

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donatj
As I recall it needs a swath of nearly a thousand ports open. Getting one
opened in a corporate environment is difficult enough.

~~~
d33
That's a weird setup! Why wouldn't they use a single port?

~~~
homero
Bunch of udp

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visarga
Oh, it's just a repost. I thought they released version 1.3 with scrollback
support.

~~~
ajdlinux
The lack of scrollback support has made mosh pretty useless to me. I like many
of its other features, but in order for it to replace ssh for me it needs to
look like it's just printing text to stdout. (Yes, this is why I also tend to
avoid using screen and tmux for anything other than holding open a remote
shell session.)

Will have to check out 1.3...

~~~
crest
mosh $REMOTE -- tmux new -ADs $SESSION

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andrewl-hn
I would really love to see an adapter layer on top of Mosh, so that it can be
a drop-in replacement for an SSH client. Currently even after you install it
on your servers you have to change your scripts and learn new CLI options. I
know that there are reasons for these differences, but inability to alias
`ssh` to `mosh` or hypothetical `mosh-ssh` hurts adoption.

~~~
StavrosK
What new CLI options? Mosh pretty much doesn't have any, you use SSH if you
want to do what SSH does.

~~~
PolCPP
Stuff like connecting to different port, you need to do --ssh="ssh -p 1111"

~~~
StavrosK
Oh, that's because you're running SSH under the hood. I see what you mean,
having the port be passed to SSH would be better from a UX standpoint, but the
thing is that mosh doesn't do everything SSH does, so it would need to fake
every SSH option and then pass them through. As it is, you only need to learn
--ssh and you can do "\--ssh=ssh -D 8223 -L 1234:localhost:1234" etc.

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cyphar
One of the weirdest issues I've had with Mosh is when you resize a window (for
example you open a new pane in tmux where you have a mosh session open). Mosh
will just cut off parts of the scrollback (if you do something like return
from vim). Is this a known issue, or should I file a new bug?

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adrinavarro
mosh is really good when used from a tablet device, ie. with Blink:
[https://twitter.com/BlinkShell](https://twitter.com/BlinkShell)

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fungi
Makes managing a cheap European vps from Australia bearable.

~~~
sschueller
While on a train going through a tunnel :) At least that is what I use it for
in Switzerland :)

~~~
LeonidasXIV
No internet in swiss tunnels? I'm a bit disappointed now.

~~~
StavrosK
Yeah, the ISPs don't support tunnelling :(

~~~
kefka
That was a very. Bad. Joke. :)

Bravo.

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homero
I love it but the clients I use don't support it. Winscp and serverauditor. I
didn't like juicessh on Android

~~~
michaelmior
I personally quite like JuiceSSH. Mosh support being one of the reasons :)
It's great for the odd scenario when something is down and I need to a quick
fix over 3G.

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atmosx
There was a FreeBSD bug in mosh, which led to high CPU usage which prevented
me from trying it twice in the past.

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pixelbeat
mosh is fantastic for me when working remotely over vpn. I don't have to worry
about reconnections, disconnections, packet lag (due to local echo feature).
mosh in combination with screen (or tmux) gives scrollback support + other
features

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tambourine_man
I really don't get HN's new dedup algorithm.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429203)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745)

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abhinavk
With Chrome apps being phased out, is a native Windows app in the pipeline?

