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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Awww.. I was reading the list of new features and on ever 'Windows:' my heart stopped a beat. Unfortunately no cookie for me..

I was really hoping for a way to have a windows equivalent of ssh controlmaster.

On the bright side: PuTTY is part of my toolbelt for ages and I cannot live without it. I'm glad to read that it's still alive and being developed.

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Its a bit lame, but you can use something like puttycyg to interface with cygwin, and then run openssh from there. It gives you the full feature set of openssh without having to use the god awful cmd.exe terminal.

Not the full feature set, unfortunately. Cygwin can't support passing file descriptors via Unix sockets, and so sadly, ControlMaster doesn't work there.

https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1278

http://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=108357562706575

I don't understand what you are saying. What were you hoping for?

He's looking for the equivalent of openssh's "ControlMaster" functionality; essentially, you establish a single (master) session to a remote machine, incurring the key negotiation penalty once, and then multiplex later sessions over that master connection.

It's a fairly effective way of getting around situations where the up-front cost of establishing the connection is high (high-latency remote connections, in particular).

I have this in Linux with a dozen lines of scripting or so. An outbound connection get made (via port 443) to a known host, over which I run a SOCKS proxy for future connections (not just ssh, it's my session proxy for everything). Check docs on ProxyCommand and the -D argument. Not sure this is really something that rises to the level of "must have GUI feature" ...

You're not getting the point.

You _can_ create tunnels via ssh, even with PuTTY. You _cannot_ use the feature I'm looking for. Tongue in cheek I'd say check the docs on the ControlMaster feature, but this is what it boils down:

Terminal 1:

ssh someHostThatYouNeedForLotsOfThings [options here]

(.. wait for the negotiation, connect. Good)

Terminal 2 to N

ssh thatVerySameHost [options here]

(reuses the handshake, is _much_ faster to connect)

Why do I want that? Couldn't I just use one connection and start tmux/screen? Turns out, no, I cannot. As soon as you have anything that actually needs to send data from your machine to the target host (i.e. nothing interactive. Think scp. git.) you need to open a new connection - and that's when I'm hoping for this feature on Windows.

I still don't see how these cases aren't equivalent. "ssh -D 9999 myhost" to start one connection. Future ones use a ProxyCommand of "nc -x localhost:9999 %h %p" or the equivalent (my real ones do a little more, as I'm often inside networks with finicky outbound connection policies). Done. Now wrap that in a dozen lines of scripting so you're not typing it out every time and call it a day.

You can sit and pine for some random GUI feature if you want. The rest of us are getting work done.

Your tone starts lacking now. If you don't understand a post, why don't you ask instead of assuming that the other guy is lazy or stupid?

The feature I want is _not_ a GUI feature. It's a ssh feature that is not supported on Windows. Whether you like it, need it, want it - I don't really care. It's not supported on a platform that I regularly have to use and I'd have loved to see PuTTY implement it.

There's no 'please make me a shiny button' involved, this is about a _network_ (or socket - that seems to be the limitation if I understand the reasons for the lack of this correctly) feature of the ssh _protocol_ that is not currently supported by any ssh client on Windows, for all I can tell.

Your solution - for all I can tell, solves the problem if you control client and server (you can use it to have a persistent and maybe shared connection to encapsulate random stuff). That's not my point though. I want regular commands a la ssh host something or scp, svn, git, whatever to be faster. That's something SSH supports with a feature that is NOT a GUI feature (just making sure that you get it). But not on Windows, unfortunately. Neither in PuTTY nor in any CLI (hint) client, for all I know.

The commercial products Tunnelier and SecureCRT can do this for shell windows and their bundled sftp clients. Didn't check if they can support third-party tools like git.

But even for shells, I went back to PuTTY anyway -- It came down to cost + time setting up on new machines vs. using PuTTY's "Duplicate Session" feature with ssh keys loaded into Pageant.

Since then I've moved on to using a persistent X11 VNC session over a plink tunnel :)

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