SSH server development status
05, AprThought I'd put up a quick update on where we stand. We've been working hard trying to get a ssh server and client incorporated in the code. We've been using the libssh library.
The server as it stands right now does public key authentication and manages X11 forwarding - however this is a little flaky. For reasons that we're still trying to debug along with the libssh team the code fails. This happens roughly 20% of the time. This seems to be caused because a function in libssh ssh_handle_packets blocks while waiting for the channel state to be flagged as open. This function is called by channel_open which we call when we open an X11 channel back to the client.
As a temporary hack and to debug the issue if I change the libssh code for this function to have a timeout of 2 seconds instead of infinite timeout while it waits for the event, things improve and the failure rate goes down to ~2%. However of course this is just a hack and the libssh team is working hard to debug this :)
Thank you Milo, Andreas and Aris amongst others of the libssh team for helping us out with this :)