WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 12429203

Mosh: the mobile shell

145 points| nichodges | 9 years ago |mosh.org | reply

49 comments

order
[+] insaneirish|9 years ago|reply
As a side note, Keith Winstein (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!

[+] shocks|9 years ago|reply
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

[+] d33|9 years ago|reply
Why would you need agent forwarding? It's a really dangerous feature.
[+] Mic92|9 years ago|reply
I use this patch for some time and it works great for me.
[+] okket|9 years ago|reply
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.

[+] qwertyuiop924|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] donatj|9 years ago|reply
As I recall it needs a swath of nearly a thousand ports open. Getting one opened in a corporate environment is difficult enough.
[+] d33|9 years ago|reply
That's a weird setup! Why wouldn't they use a single port?
[+] sschueller|9 years ago|reply
depends on number of connections, 60000-60020 works fine.
[+] visarga|9 years ago|reply
Oh, it's just a repost. I thought they released version 1.3 with scrollback support.
[+] ajdlinux|9 years ago|reply
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...

[+] andrewl-hn|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
What new CLI options? Mosh pretty much doesn't have any, you use SSH if you want to do what SSH does.
[+] cyphar|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] fungi|9 years ago|reply
Makes managing a cheap European vps from Australia bearable.
[+] sschueller|9 years ago|reply
While on a train going through a tunnel :) At least that is what I use it for in Switzerland :)
[+] homero|9 years ago|reply
I love it but the clients I use don't support it. Winscp and serverauditor. I didn't like juicessh on Android
[+] michaelmior|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] atmosx|9 years ago|reply
There was a FreeBSD bug in mosh, which led to high CPU usage which prevented me from trying it twice in the past.
[+] pixelbeat|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] abhinavk|9 years ago|reply
With Chrome apps being phased out, is a native Windows app in the pipeline?