Mobile Shell (mosh) Review

[Tom Miller]

http://mosh.mit.edu/

This week I had to travel to Louisiana. On the way down there I used my phone for mobile internet on my laptop. I was having problems using ssh to work on some servers because of the intermittent connectivity to the internet while jumping from tower to tower. So one of my coworkers recommended I give mosh a try, and I was really impressed.

So mosh is supposed to be a replacement for ssh. The biggest feature of mosh is maintaining a connection during intermittent connectivity, and it did an excellent job at this. It is also very responsive, when you type a character it doesn't wait for the server to respond to draw it. Later it synchronizes the client with a response from the server and corrects the display. Using Ctrl-^ or Ctrl-6 you can quit mosh or suspend the entire mosh session and foreground it later.

The way I used mosh required no configuration, only that I install it on my laptop and the server. Then I had to open incoming/outgoing UDP ports 60000 - 61000 on the server. When connecting to the server with mosh it first uses ssh to connect to the server and allowed me to use defined hosts from my .ssh/config file. After it establishes an ssh connection it executes the mosh server on the remote machine and swaps over to using UDP. If I misunderstood how that works please correct me.

I plan on using mosh for most of my servers that I use for messing around. Maybe Simo could chime in on the security features, but I think opening a wide range of UDP ports to a production server for use with a new program is probably a bad idea. Feel free to ask questions on topics I might have missed, I didn't use it for very long, but I'll try to answer any questions anyone has about it.

[Josh Adams]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 10:06 AM, Tom Miller <jack...@gmail.com> wrote:

http://mosh.mit.edu/

...

I plan on using mosh for most of my servers that I use for messing around. Maybe Simo could chime in on the security features, but I think opening a wide range of UDP ports to a production server for use with a new program is probably a bad idea. Feel free to ask questions on topics I might have missed, I didn't use it for very long, but I'll try to answer any questions anyone has about it

Very cool Tom, good to hear your experience with it.  I keep meaning to mess with it but I have not yet, so I'll take this as a proxy for my having liked it :)  Thanks... 

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Josh Adams