The idea would be to setup an internal tmate.io server to make instant command line collaboration easier.

tmate-screencast

All Linux engineers love the command line and it would be really cool to have an infrastructure tool that
allows spontaneous, low bandwidth, screen sharing.

tmate-flowchart

I did some packaging work on the tmate server part called tmate-slave and the tmate client package
is already present inside the utilities repository. So the effort for this project idea would be straightforward.

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This project is part of:

Hack Week 13

Activity

  • almost 9 years ago: aspiers liked this project.
  • about 9 years ago: SShyukriev liked this project.
  • about 9 years ago: abergmann joined this project.
  • about 9 years ago: M0ses started this project.
  • about 9 years ago: ganglia liked this project.
  • about 9 years ago: M0ses liked this project.
  • about 9 years ago: mbrugger liked this project.
  • about 9 years ago: kalabiyau liked this project.
  • about 9 years ago: abergmann originated this project.

  • Comments

    • M0ses
      about 9 years ago by M0ses | Reply

      I would like to have such a service also, so I did some preparation:

      • I prepared a package for tumbleweed and leap: obs://home:M0ses/tmate-slave
        • Leap and Tumbleweed
        • Feel free to comment
      • tmate-slave only builds against msgpack < 1.0.0 (e.g. 0.5.9)
      • known_hosts file might prevent from connecting if you already connect the same host with normal ssh

      • dmuhamedagic
        about 9 years ago by dmuhamedagic | Reply

        Did you hear about kibitz? It's an old tool providing this functionality, implemented in tcl and expect.

    • M0ses
      about 9 years ago by M0ses | Reply

      No, never heard about kibitz, but taken from the kibitz man page:

      If you start kibitz to user2 on a remote computer, kibitz performs a rlogin to the remote computer with your current username
      

      IMO, a tool using rlogin should not be used anymore.

      Advantage I see in tmate:

      • it runs as a central service which makes it easy to remember
      • easy to use without need of local accounts for both parties on one host (like in case of screen,tmux etc)
      • Firewall rules don`t matter, as the host (the user who wants to share a session) has no incomming ssh traffic on his machine

      I installed the package on a VM and documented how to try it under http://e144.suse.de

      A few things missing, to make it a "real" internal service

      • registered DNS-Name (e.g. tmate.suse.de)
      • A productive VM (e.g. in cloud.suse.de with SLE 12)
      • operational concept ???

      • abergmann
        about 9 years ago by abergmann | Reply

        Nice job. The only thing that I've noticed is that only the tmate hostname is shown in the status bar instead of the FQDN.

        Did you start the tmate-slave with the -h parameter and the FQDN?

        tmate-slave -k /etc/tmate-slave/keys/ -h tmate.suse.de -l /var/log/tmate-slave.log &amp;
        

    • M0ses
      about 9 years ago by M0ses | Reply

      If you get the following error message :

      [tmate] Error connecting: kex error : no match for method server host key algo: server [ssh-dss,ssh-rsa], client [ecdsa-sha2-nistp256] 
      

      then cleanup your known_hosts file

    • M0ses
      about 9 years ago by M0ses | Reply

      DNS entry for tmate.suse.de is requested

      • abergmann
        about 9 years ago by abergmann | Reply

        Looks like the domain is already online. :-)

        #&gt; dig +short tmate.suse.de [@10](/users/10).160.0.1
        10.162.168.241
        

        • M0ses
          about 9 years ago by M0ses | Reply

          yeah, thx to @rwawrig, who configured it 9 minutes after requesting it :-) - See here for more info

    • M0ses
      about 9 years ago by M0ses | Reply

      if errors occure while conneting, I would suggest to temporarly move you ssh keys

    • M0ses
      about 9 years ago by M0ses | Reply

      Service is up and running, but not yet reboot aware (loosing hostname during reboot). Maybe one of the cloud guys could shade some light on my, why this is happening.

    • M0ses
      almost 9 years ago by M0ses | Reply

      Service seems to be reboot aware now. hostname problem could be solved due to a tip from @ms to "cloud-init". After repackaging with systemd service files instead of init script, tmate-slave is coming up properly after reboot

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