Bug 314827

Description Martin Oberhuber 2010-05-28 04:52:41 EDT

Build ID: TM 3.2rc3

The idea here was that we could use the new "Local Terminal" support in order to perform SSH connections with an external SSH program rather than the built-in SSH. The advantage of doing so is that we could leverage authentication options which the builtin SSH does not support:

  - OpenSSH agent authentication (requested in bug 259671)
  - OpenSSH host alias names from config file (requested in bug 210227)
  - SSH Kerberos authentication (requested in bug 265711)

And of course the same functionality could be used for any other kind of remote terminal connections over communication channels that are not built into TM today, but for which an external program is available. I have tried this with rlogin on a Linux host:

  - Window > Show View > Other > Terminal > Terminal
  - Press Properties button
  - Create a New Configuration, with settings as follows:
      - Location  = /usr/bin/rlogin
      - Arguments = ahost.adomain
  - Press Close button
  - Press OK button

This worked just great for me. Even vi editing while resizing the terminal worked properly as expected (thanks to the fix for bug 314195).

Since this is a great feature but not exactly obvious, I think we should document in the user docs (and blog it). Also - given that the requests cited above had all been for RSE but not for the terminal - we should think about providing a similar "Local Connector over external program" for RSE.

I would like to solicit community feedback about these ideas on this bug.