Re: SSH Tunneling implementation

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 12:52 PM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:
>>> Can we identify which version of libssh is required, and have a
>>> configure check for it? AFAICT they are all on 1.2 until the *next*
>>> release - so is it really something that breaks on just a minor
>>> version? If so, we really need a configure check for it.
>>>
>>> I think it's ok to say that we can't build with that feature on 10.04
>>> (assuming we can find a configure test for it). less sure about
>>> something that's less than a year old such as 11.10.
>>
>> Yeah, that seems reasonable. I'd also suggest pinging the libssh2
>> mailing lists to see if there's another API that you've missed, or if
>> they can explain why it's necessary to provide the public key and
>> private one.
>>
>> So... something to think about in parallel with that; if we cannot
>> deal with this cleanly using libssh2, should we go back to the
>> original plan that Akshay and I discussed privately, which was to have
>> pgAdmin spawn ssh (or putty on Windows) processes to provide the
>> tunnels?
>
> Ugh. That seems pretty painful. Particularly on windows where you're
> going to end up with an actual window (whether hidden or not).

It's ugly, but not necessarily painful. We have existing code for
finding executables and running them. And putty does have a tunnel app
which is (I believe), windowless.

> I'd
> definitely suggest putting more effort into getting it working with
> libssh2 first. Absolute worst-case, maybe embed a verison of libssh
> inside pgadmin and use static linking until we hit more modern
> platforms? I don't believe it's that big...

Right - and the licence is agreeable. At least that way we could more
easily tell what encryption library we're using, and show/hide the
public key option as appropriate.

> (But yes, first try the list for it. And if you don't get responses
> there (at all), let me know and I'll bug some of the people - while I
> haven't used it myself, I do know at least one of those developers
> pretty well)

Oh, you do? Handy...

--
Dave Page
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