Bug report : MC freezes reproducable when requesting SSH password for Fish VFS

[Hans Peter Stroebel]

Am Mittwoch,  3. Oktober 2001 06:25 schrieb Pavel Roskin:

Hi Pavel !

> Unfortunately, ssh insists on reading passwords from /dev/tty, which makes
> it quite hard for MC to feed the password to ssh.  If you look into
> fish.c, you would find that MC is supposed to show you an error message
>
> "Sorry, we can not do password authenticated connections for now."
>
> I understand from you description that it doesn't work this way for you.

Right, mc hangs before displaying this message.

> If you have a hacked ssh that supports the "-I" option (read from stdin),
> you can define HAVE_HACKED_SSH and then MC is supposed to ask yuo the
> password and feed it to ssh through stdin.
>
> This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere outside the source.
> I believe, this functionality can be improved.  In the meantime, fish

Due to _very_ low programming skills I`m not able to even try to provide a 
solution :-(

> can only be used over ssh connections that don't require a password.

Maybe at least a note in the manpage as a Q&D solution ? ;-)

> > This password request freezes MC after displaying the "Waiting for an
> > initial line..." message, messing up the console output (sometimes the
> > request appears on top of the screen, sometimes at the bottom). MC does
> > not accept any more input and has to be forcely killed.
>
> That's clearly a bug.

I tried it in the meantime with an RSA key containing a passphrase, same 
problem. It works only if the SSH authentication doesn`t require _any_ user 
interaction (RSA key with empty passphrase).

> It should also be possible to hack ssh to read stdin if "-I" is specified.
> I don't know if there are any patches available.

I did not look at the ssh source yet, but I don`t know even if I would be 
able to do it if it isn`t implemented as an option in the source. Do you have 
any further info ?

> > A fix would be highly welcome, as I consider the MC Fish VFS as a _very_
> > interesting alternative to scp, sftp or ftp tunneling.
>
> I agree with you.  Fixes to the existing code are welcome, much more than
> new half-implemented features.

I tried to use a wrapper perl script around the ssh client, but it fails 
because of the same problem : no input from stdin.

Trying it with an RSA key without passphrase, I noticed that fish vfs is 
_really_ cool ! Compliments....

Anyway, thanks for mc to all devel folks and for your quick response.

cu

Hans

-- 

Hans Peter Stroebel <hpstr at operamail.com>

Yes, I do. But not Yahoo.