Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Mosh improvement

The mobile shell mosh is very convenient substitute to the traditional ssh. I have now test used it in Linux and Android (JuiceSSH) for a couple of weeks. There is one issue that I have noticed. If the client process dies while connection is broken - most common scenario that you run out of battery - the server process does not receive any notification and remains running forever, or until manually killed or system boots. Even if old mosh-servers are running, new mosh sessions will start new server processes at server side every time.

I have now number of such mosh-server processes idling for more than a week. Of course I can terminate them manually, but that is not a generic solution. Consider a general purpose server with hundreds or thousands of users, like a university terminal server. Then you may start getting troubles with all the mosh servers doing nothing but consume memory.

I have recognized two possible solution alternatives. First is the dirty one, implement a timeout at server side that will terminate the server after certain idle period. That's against the philosophy of mosh and SSP, but if you make it user configurable, as a command line argument for example, then it's possibly not such a big crime.

Second solution is more sophisticated, by enabling recovery of existing connection by a new client session. This approach requires security credentials of the session to be stored locally at the client side.  Management of old and new sessions might then cause headache, and I understand that the development team of the mosh didn't chosen this solution. After all, originally it was just a research project at MIT.

I'd accept the timeout approach. The old good screen program takes care of maintaining my persistent session at server, thus I don't see a problem starting a new mosh session after 48 or 96 hours of communication break. I'd would be easy to implement, and would not compromise the security architecture by any way.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Jaakko,

    JuiceSSH dev here. Just wanted to let you know that we're working with the Mosh developers to hopefully get your second solution in place.
    Please let us know your thoughts on JuiceSSH, we love the feedback!

    Thanks,
    Tom

    ReplyDelete