As we've stated in our roadmap (blog post Information on next release) , our focus and target for this month has been to have an integrated ssh client and ssh server using libssh.
This will allow us to avoid the ugly bash scripts that call the openssh sshd and ssh programs. More importantly this will allow us to set our own policies with regards authentication keys.
So it's March end and where have we reached? Am proud to say we're doing very well and are bang on target :)
SSH Server :
I've been working with the guys over at libssh, in particular Milo Jhoran, who's been helping me put the pubkey authentication and X11 forwarding which has been quite a struggle. The current status is that I have a standalone libssh based server ready that does public key authentication and finally X11 forwarding works too :)
I still need to tighten the screws a little and iron out a few bugs. I need to do some error handling, make sure that when a x client gets terminated all channels are released. The biggest bug that I'm working on right now is that for some reason while it performs well about 8 of 10 times, it fails inexplicably the balance 20% of the time in our tests. I'm guessing this has to do with certain error conditions I should be checking and handling. However the major bulk of the work is DONE :)
SSH Client:
Erle has been working on the client and has been making some good progress. As of this morning he gave me the great news that he's managed to get pubkey authentication working and has made significant progress with handling X11 forwarding too :) I'll leave him to shed light on the details :)
Once we're satisfied with how our standalone client and server are functioning we will integrate these in the eBrainPool code :)
...and onwards we march :)