possibility of a RemoteCommand option in the ssh config file

Remi Paulmier remi.paulmier at gmail.com
Fri Sep 23 20:48:04 AEST 2016


Hi,

About one year ago, someone (Simon Zack) asked about a RemoteCommand
option.

His question did not encounter a large amount of answers, maybe because
Simon himself did not answer to a question from Darren Tucker about his use
case ? However, I think I have a use case pretty close to Simon's one:

Let's imagine a host named 'lxc.host.example.org', hosting many LXC
containers named '<cont>.lxc.host.example.org'.
With a RemoteCommand option, working pretty much the same as the
ProxyCommand one, we could write something like:

$ cat ~/.ssh/config
Host host.lxc.example.org
    RequestTTY force

Host *.host.lxc.example.org
    Hostname host.lxc.example.org
    RemoteCommand lxc-attach -n %h --

That way, we would be able to attach to containers, without the need to run
sshd inside each container, by running:

$ ssh mycontainer.host.lxc.example.org

A bit of difference with the ProxyCommand behaviour, though: the %h macro
should expand to the host that was requested on the cli; not the one
specified with Hostname.

I know I can specify the command on the cli, or even make an alias, but it
would introduce an interface difference for the end-user between regular
hosts and lxc containers.

Any opinion ?

Kind regards,
rémi


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