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Into the Pit

Well, it seems that mobile has really come of age and the standard sysadmin tool of SSH really doesn’t cut it any more; anyone who has suffered the frustration of a dropped connection in the middle of doing something or just shutting their laptop lid by mistake when docking is going to love MOSH.

MOSH is a replacement for SSH which supports roaming and intermittent connections; actually, you still need SSH to make the initial connection but when the connection is made, it is handed over to the mosh-server. There are many cool things about MOSH; firstly it doesn’t run as a daemon and in fact, you don’t even need to get your friendly admin to install it for you. You can happily run it from your own home directory; of course, I would suggest that you do get your friendly admin to install it for everyone and themselves!

For laggy connections, MOSH does not wait for the server to respond before displaying what you’ve typed; on a laggy connection, it’s a bit reminiscent of using the old mainframe terminals but much, much nicer. On an unreliable connection, MOSH will underline outstanding actions so that you should never get lost. This even works with VIM and other full-screen editors, this will be a bit of mind-f**k at first but you’ll soon get used to it.

It is still missing some SSH functionality but it appears to be coming on quickly.

MOSH is cool but there’s a catch; there’s no Windows client yet, I’m sure someone will get round to it. And there’s no mobile clients yet as far as I could tell; it is crying out for an Android and iOS client to become truly awesome.

But give it at go; I think that it’ll eventually become my default remote client…

MOSH can be found here


One Comment

  1. JuiceSSH for android now support MOSH 😉

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