22.12.2018

The Advent of Void: Day 22: autossh

SSH. The very use of the acronym screams “Knows which end of the computer needs to be plugged in.” It can be used to confirm your computers are working, to transfer files (two ways!), as a SOCKS proxy (didn’t know this? Go read the man page, option -D , it’s brilliant), and even as a poor man’s VPN.

Poor man’s VPN?

Well, I have a computer that lives behind a firewall. I can’t adjust the firewall. But I want to use that computer. Legally, mark you, I have permission from the network owners, it’s just not practical to adjust the firewall.

What to do?

Well, set up an ssh tunnel of course! In this case, localhost is the target computer, and the other hostname is a place I can access more readily than localhost .

$ ssh -NR $portA:localhost:22 nbis.gov

But problems. My local network isn’t the best, and sometimes when there is a power outage my computer comes up first. I could just create a runit service to make sure the ssh connection is running…. and I did, for a while, but when it failed it failed very badly. Finally, I settled on autossh . What does autossh do? Automatically runs an SSH command. You can configure a lot about how it does this, how many times it tries, how long it waits between tries, what the backoffs are, everything like that. So, I combined the best of both worlds: autossh (which should never crash) wrapped in a user service with runit (which should always remember to start autossh)

#!/bin/sh [ -r ./conf ] && . ./conf : ${portA:=2222} : ${targetHost:=localhost} exec autossh -M 0 -NR ${portA}:localhost:22 $targetHost

And my problem is (mostly) solved! So, in summary: SSH is an amazing tool, and autossh helps you keep your ssh tunnels alive.

One point about configuration, from the manpage:

Other than the flag to set the connection monitoring port, autossh uses environment variables to control features. ssh seems to be still collecting letters for options, and this seems the easiest way to avoid collisions.

and there are 13 environment variables right now, so plenty you can choose to configure.

For more information, examples, and to see the list of relevant environment variables, please read the autossh(1) manpage.