"Virtual hosts" for ssh

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Johannes Ernst <johannes.ernst at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

You've stepped into one of my fun areas, mixing technologies to attain
a desired result, especially SSH and source control.

As long as you can gracefully use a different IP address for each
environment, it's workable. If you do it hostname based, you can get
in deep confusion with all the different valid versions of the same
hostname, such as WWW.eXaMplE.CoM versus www.example.com versus www
(with a local domain set of example.com), and trying to match them
all. That's an old problem with "VirtualHosts" from web servers, as
well.

Alternatively, don't use the "same user" for different projects on the
same server. Use a different git shared username for each project
environment. Since your git environments are normally defined by the
home directory of the actual shared git username, this may be much
faster and easier to set up and require no root managed manipulation
of your sshd_config.

         Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

> 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.
>
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