"Virtual hosts" for ssh

[Johannes Ernst]

It'd be very cool if ssh supported something like Apache "virtual hosts". This would make it much more viable to host multiple installs of git on the same server, for example.

More details:

On the remote server, ssh already sets some environment variables:

> printenv | grep SSH
SSH_CLIENT=192.168.1.18 50945 22
SSH_TTY=/dev/pts/1
SSH_CONNECTION=192.168.1.18 50945 192.168.1.1 22

What about adding another, say
SSH_SERVER_HOST=host1

Assuming that /etc/hosts
192.168.1.1 host1 host2
then
ssh user at host1
and
ssh user at host2
would lead to a shell on the same host with the same user, but SSH_SERVER_HOST would be different, and that would allow the creation of a script that, for example, could find the correct git repository given the virtual hostname. This is currently not possible because the script only has IP addresses.

Presumably that would not be too hard to do?

Cheers,


Johannes.