Connection caching?

[Damien Miller]

On Sun, 2 May 2004, Dan Kegel wrote:

> Would it be possible to pass a new hostname to that unix domain
> socket, and have it fire up a new physical connection, too,
> such that a single copy of ssh could support simultaneous connections
> to all the machines in the distcc cluster?   That would simplify
> the addressing question, and would make using this with a large
> cluster a lot easier, too.

I don't much like the idea of a single ssh instance representing multiple 
client to server connections. It would add a fair bit of complexity to 
ssh for (IMO) little benefit.

As for the naming issue, using predictable names in a safe 
directory could resolve that problem. Something like 
"ControlSocket ~/.ssh/control-%h" (%h = hostname) would allow something 
like distcc to programatically detect whether a new connection is 
required.

If one really wants a single interface to multiple sessions, then one 
could implement a separate mux daemon that does the above.

-d