Autossh

[condor]

re: autossh and it's persistence. When enabled, does it actually establish a connection to the relay server, and the server holds the conn, or is it just constantly trying to connect, and when you log on to the vps using -p 4255 etc, the connection is then established? I could probably look through auth.log files on the server and come to a conclusion, but I am looking for a definitive answer that doesn't involve my own garbled 'self-teaching'.=)

[Darren Kitchen]

Autossh maintains an SSH connection to your server. What autossh does is watch the SSH connection and if it drops it'll restart SSH. It's like an SSH wrapper. Monitoring is done over port 10000 IIRC and it does a damn good job of keeping a tunnel open.

That said we have a wrapper around the wrapper in the form of ssh-keepalive.sh, which periodically checks to make sure autossh itself hasn't crashed and restarts it if necessary. Just added protection.

Check out Hak5 episode 1112 for an in-depth walk through on configuring a WiFi Pineapple with autossh and a VPS:

http://hak5.org/episodes/hak5-1112

[condor]

"Who are you...who are so wise in the ways of science?"

I was cracking up when I heard you and snubsie quoting old Monty Python.

Way back when I first got the pineapple, I was trying my little heart out to get this autossh to work. But not until the other day when I saw this video and watched you copy paste the RSA public key did I realize that I was only copying inbetween ssh-rsa and root@pineapple, seeing you do it helped. The help in the UI says :

You'll need the from "ssh-rsa" to "root@Pineapple"

anyway, thanks

Edited July 19, 2012 by condor

[Darren Kitchen]

You know I realized that and when I was writing the book I changed the language a bit to clarify that it's everything from (and including) ssh-rsa to root@Pineapple.

[7ncubane]

Hi. If I'm using a relay server that uses non-standard ssh port, how does it work. My server has ssh port on 45678. The standard autossh command, "autossh -M 20000 -N -R 4255:localhost:22 user@server.com -i /etc/dropbear/id_rsa" doesn't work. Before I changed the ssh port, it worked fine, but too many break-in attempt with port 22. I tried adding -o "Port 45678" to the command, but didn't work. Any tips?

[Bitstream]

Hi. If I'm using a relay server that uses non-standard ssh port, how does it work. My server has ssh port on 45678. The standard autossh command, "autossh -M 20000 -N -R 4255:localhost:22 user@server.com -i /etc/dropbear/id_rsa" doesn't work. Before I changed the ssh port, it worked fine, but too many break-in attempt with port 22. I tried adding -o "Port 45678" to the command, but didn't work. Any tips?

Use "autossh -M 20000 -f -N -R 4255:localhost:22 user@server.com -p 45678 -i /etc/dropbear/id_rsa"

[7ncubane]

Will give it a try. Thanks.