ssh over udp (or: -L option listening for traffic with a UDP service?)

[Dan Kaminsky]

ssh has support for ProxyCommand, which allows you to swap out the underlying TCP transport for "something else" (in my case, DNS).

There used to be a really nice tool for reliable UDP comms over GPRS, but I can't find it. Probably something could be build with UDT or ENET...

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 10, 2012, at 1:22 PM, Edward Peschko <ed.peschko at gmail.com> wrote:

> All,
> 
> A bit of background: I work on a QA API on a network that is very choppy (a
> lot of network interrupts), and we use ssh to do a large part of this
> automation.
> 
> This leads to some problems: ssh connections seem to be sensitive to
> network state, becoming unusable if the choppiness reaches a certain
> threshold, and either timing out or disconnecting if this happens.
> 
> Anyways, I stumbled across mosh (mobile open shell at http://mosh.mit.edu/)
> which is *very* usable over choppy links. In fact you can disconnect
> altogether, and reconnect hours after the fact and still be connected to
> your host.
> 
> This led me to thinking - it has this flexibility because it uses a very
> relaxed UDP policy for its connections - and for automation's sake I'd like
> to use the same policy for sshd. Because everything is automated through
> expect, there are no issues with responsiveness, or choppiness, so a large
> buffer could compensate for a bad network.
> 
> At first I tried services like duat and tcpoverudp, which transparently
> portforward traffic from udp to tcp. But these don't work because it looks
> like the udp sessions don't hold the ssh connection well.
> 
> Which lead me to what I hope is a workable design. I'd like to setup
> something that looks like the following:
> 
> Process 1: udp:local     <=> Process 2: udp:remote (forwards to)
> tcp:ssh_client <=> tcp:ssh_server
> 
> Where the ssh communication is all local to the server, and the commands
> are sent over a local UDP client to a UDP remote. The purpose of the ssh
> client/server connection is to avoid the network choppiness and keep the
> connection alive, and the purpose of the udp connection is to actually
> handle the traffic and network choppiness.
> 
> So a couple of questions:
> 
> 1. Is this doable?
> 2. Has anybody done it?
> 
> I see the '-L' option to ssh, so it looks like that's a hook to do this,
> but AFAICT, the listening port is TCP and TCP only. Is it possible to make
> it UDP and UDP only, and to put hooks in to have the traffic be handled by
> a UDP protocol of the user's choosing.
> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated, it is exceedingly frustrating to
> have an automation that takes hours to setup to basically die because of a
> network hiccup, and we are in dire need of a more robust mechanism for
> communication.
> 
> Thanks much,
> 
> Ed
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