Last night I got really fed up with the SSH setup in Informatics at UoE, so I finally set out to automate it as much as I could and get rid of some ad-hoc scripts and aliases I had been using so far. In the process, I discovered some really cool SSH features, which I describe later on.

First of all, I had to set up Kerberos because key-based authentication is disabled. This was a simple matter of installing the krb5-user debian package, adding INF.ED.AC.UK as the domain and running: [1]

kinit sxxxxxxx@inf.ed.ac.uk

I could then login with Kerberos credentials by passing the -K flag to SSH.

What’s equally useful however is bypassing the SSH gateway. The best way to do this is by using the ProxyCommand option of SSH. I found a blog post explaining its usage, while a more elaborate configuration allowing for arbitrary hops is described in reddit. What follows is the corresponding snippet from my ~/.ssh/config file:

Compression yes

# SSH Gateway.
Host inf
User sxxxxxxx
GSSAPIDelegateCredentials yes
HostName student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk

# Compute server.
Host compute
User sxxxxxxx
Cipher blowfish
GSSAPIDelegateCredentials yes
HostName student.compute.inf.ed.ac.uk
ProxyCommand ssh inf nc -w 240 student.compute 22

# NESS HPC server.
Host ness
User sxxxxxxx
Cipher blowfish
HostName ness.epcc.ed.ac.uk
ProxyCommand ssh inf nc -w 240 ness.epcc.ed.ac.uk 22

# Gerrit/Git hosting service.
Host gerrit
Port 29418
User sxxxxxxx
Cipher blowfish
HostName gerrit.not-a-service.inf.ed.ac.uk

# SOCKS5 proxy for Firefox:
# Invoke as `ssh -Nn tunnel` and add the following settings in user.js:
# user_pref("network.proxy.socks", "localhost");
# user_pref("network.proxy.socks_port", 8080);
# user_pref("network.proxy.socks_remote_dns", true);
# user_pref("network.proxy.type", 1);
Host tunnel
User sxxxxxxx
GSSAPIDelegateCredentials yes
HostName student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk
DynamicForward localhost:8080
Cipher blowfish
LogLevel QUIET
RequestTTY no

This works seamlessly with sshfs, and I can now mount compute‘s ramdisk —which I use for scratch space— to circumvent my quota restrictions, e.g.

sshfs compute:/dev/shm/mike ~/mnt

Initially sshfs and scp would not work correctly. After some digging around I discovered the culprit in my remote .bashrc file. Because I did not have permissions to change my default shell to my local installation of zsh, I had placed an exec zsh command at the end of the .bashrc file. This was problematic for non-interactive shells, like those invoked by scp and sshfs. The solution was to move the offending snippet to ~/.bash_login.

Besides the proxy setup, the above configuration adds handy shortcuts for the hosts. The GSSAPIDelegateCredentials option is the equivalent of the -K flag. For ness and gerrit I just use key-based authentication. The -w 240 is there to clean up the netcat process after 2 minutes of inactivity.

The final entry is for tunneling my Firefox traffic through the SSH gateway. This is useful because the IP pool of the university’s VPN does not provide access to all services. It also allows me to cleanly separate my university traffic. For a similar setup, just add a SOCKS5 proxy from the Network Preferences, and set socks_remote_dns to true in about:config. Alternatively, paste the commented lines in a file named user.js inside your Firefox profile directory.

When disks fail

In the last year I’ve had to recover data from two failing disks as well as one accidental formating. Overall I was successful, thanks to a couple of excellent free software power tools: ddrescue [1] and testdisk.

Because the process is somewhat involved, I decided to write this short ...

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