Channel documentation?

[rapier]

Peter,

On 5/21/21 3:04 PM, Peter Stuge wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> rapier wrote:
>> Is there any documentation (outside of the code) describing the channel
>> functions?
> 
> The channel functions in the OpenSSH codebase? Probably no.

That was my guess but it never hurts to ask.

>> I'm looking at using a secondary channel to periodically report back
>> receiver side TCP metrics (via the TCP_INFO struct) to the caller for
>> flow diagnostics. Alternatively, is there a good place in the code
>> base I can use as a starting point to understand the process?
> 
> Are you familiar with channels in general? RFC 4254 5. Channel Mechanism.

Sort of familiar but only as much as it impacted on HPNSSH. It's been a 
while since I read the RFC so thank you for the pointer.

> If you want to control exactly when data from (your metric) channels
> are sent on the wire I think you have to do quite a deep dive into the code.

While I'm not opposed to deep dives I don't need a specific trigger. I'm 
really just going to look for an update every N seconds so a timing loop 
would work.

Basically, the idea is on connection two channels are open - one for the 
user and one for metrics. Every N seconds read the TCP_INFO data from 
the tcp socket and send it down the metric channel which writes it to 
stdout, a file, whatever.

> If you care less about jitter then you can maybe look at SFTP but
> probably much better any of the socket forwarding.

So socket forwarding... I'll take a look at that.

> If you want to implement the metric completely in the application layer
> you could investigate creating it in a subsystem, which (like SFTP) is
> also just a channel.

Can that ride alongside other actions like SFTP or SCP or even just a 
tty? Mostly I'm looking to gather metrics from real world usage. Either 
way it looks promising.

Thanks for insight,

Chris