All You Need Is SSH

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

Bogdanp

31 points

13 comments

wrongthink.linkTechstory

calmpositive

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SSHRemote AccessCommand Line Tools

Key topics

SSH

Remote Access

Command Line Tools

The article 'All You Need Is SSH' highlights the versatility of SSH for remote access and management, sparking a discussion on its various uses and configurations.

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01Story posted
Sep 9, 2025 at 5:47 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Sep 9, 2025 at 6:17 PM EDT
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4 months ago
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Discussion (13 comments)

Showing 13 comments

johnea

4 months ago

1 reply

This is a really refreshing link in the HN feed, which is often dominated by the latest bloatware fashion trends (which includes most (almost all) chatbot applications).

One different preference of mine is to mount a remote directory via SSHFS instead of playing media via an sftp:// link.

I also prefer a clicky-clicky media player over MPV and have used VLC for many years.

Another feature of OpenSSH that facilitates this philosophy is port forwarding, both forward and reverse. This feature prevents having to open pretty much any other port in the firewall.

Its sad to see so many technically literate people still working under the feature poor yoke of windoze 8-( So many methods become instantly available when using a free unix system. Which also typically never require downloading binary executables from sketchy third party websites.

+1 for "all you need is SSH"

Gualdrapo

4 months ago

1 reply

> I also prefer a clicky-clicky media player over MPV

Not sure what do you mean by that; if you compile mpv with lua support (in case your distro/whatever doesn't ship it that way, that is) you get a clicky-clicky little osd thing within the mpv window that suffices (back, forward, playback control, volume...)

johnea

4 months ago

Thanks for the reply! (I upvoted you)

I have used that UI in MPV, but it just wasn't satisfying.

VLC is a native GUI application and I just find the interface more easily usable.

Not just play/stop, etc, but all of the preferences, etc are via a GUI interface.

Totally personal preference, I just prefer VLC over MPV.

Somewhat counter to all of that, I do often use the hotkeys to control various features during playback (audio delay, that sort of thing).

I just feel that VLC is a more GUI oriented application, and in spite of being a mostly command line linux user, I do enjoy a floating window manager desktop (fluxbox is my long time preference).

Thanks again for the reply!

lucyjojo

4 months ago

2 replies

my 3 year old is not going to type

    mpv sftp://192.168.1.123:/home/remote-user/Films/Peppa_Pig_Against_Gerrymandering.mkv

she can't type yet...

000ooo000

4 months ago

1 reply

Is your three year old in the tech circles TFA is referencing?

lucyjojo

4 months ago

Unless the guys on tech circles the TFA is mentioning are all singles and plan to stay so voluntarily or not, a (good?) portion of them have, had, or will have 3 year olds!

In fact I maintain one of those setups mentioned by TFA with some neighbours (lots of tech people/artists with rare media in the neighborhood for reasons), and friends and family in other countries.

The whole point of most of these setups (for people with family), is to be safe, simple, efficient, and low-maintenance for the whole family to be able to enjoy media.

johnea

4 months ago

1 reply

When my son was about 5 years old, I set up a linux computer for him.

I used a very basic floating window manager and created about 6 or 10 large desktop icons to run the things I had installed for him (Hyperspace Delivery Boy was a favorite 8-)

One icon started a script which launched the media player in a specific directory.

I highly recommend giving (very young) kids exposure to a wide variety of desktop user interfaces. Failure to do this has led to an entire generation (2 or 3?) of windoze based computer illiteracy.

Computers really aren't all about right-clicking that thing that looks like a pineapple, then selecting Settings, etc...

lucyjojo

4 months ago

if my daughter shows interest into computing at some point i might get her a pinebook similarly setup

znpy

4 months ago

1 reply

One other super-interesting feature is connection multiplexing and keeping connection alive with the ControlMaster and ControlPath directives in your ~/.ssh/config file.

The nice thing is that it makes opening a new ssh connection much faster, which if you make a lot of connections, it can be very handy.

See https://ldpreload.com/blog/ssh-control for some examples

da-x

4 months ago

Note that it has one pitfall that is hard to notice: if you a use per-invocation `-o SendEnv`, that gets ignored in favor of the background ssh persistent connection that is keeping the session up. In other words, your connection bear the `SendEnv` of that initial connection and not of the new ones you are creating. No warning is printed.

znpy

4 months ago

This is great and... On a small scale, you don't even need samba or nfs.

Many file browsers can mount remote directories via sftp, and can browse the files as if it was a local directory.

Also: KDE and some GTK-based graphical environments have subsystems for this:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIO

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIO_(software)

theanonymousone

4 months ago

This could be relevant, also in front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45181535

bricomaz

4 months ago

Strangely no reference to "the most underrated configuration file" aka .ssh/config (reference is some internal docs I wrote) where you can name hosts whatever you want, define jumphosts to reuse to connect to different servers, specify different private keys and usernames for each host, and transform a monstrosity like

ssh -i ~/.ssh/key_A -o ProxyCommand="ssh -i /very/very/long/directory_name/hidden_somewhere/key_B user_B@jumphost -W %h:%p" user_A@192.168.1.5

into

ssh myserver

And how many knows windoze ships an ssh client (that yes supports .ssh/config) since years?

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ID: 45189700Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:11:42 PM

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