Mailing List Archive

ssh_config's Hosts directive
I'm trying to arrange the SSH client here to default to allowing
X forwarding etc. to local machines (within the .dur.ac.uk domain)
without forwarding X to off-site machines.

Now, I read that the hostname isn't canonicalised (what a horrible
word!) so I presume I have to match on both *.dur.ac.uk and
*-without-any-dots-in-it. How do I do this in practice?

If ssh is presently not configurable enough to do this, can we
extend the functionality of Hosts in some useful but still
backward-compatible manner?

Thanks,

Andrew Stribblehill
Systems programmer, IT Service, University of Durham
Re: ssh_config's Hosts directive [ In reply to ]
> I'm trying to arrange the SSH client here to default to allowing
> X forwarding etc. to local machines (within the .dur.ac.uk domain)
> without forwarding X to off-site machines.

Note that using names instead of ip addresses leaves you vulnerable to
some nasty DNS attacks (of course, IP authentication in the first place is
less than perfect). They're not too likely to give you problems so long
as you also use (password/crypto/whatever) authentication such as ssh uses
normally, but they're something to watch out for.

-Sean Lisse