I've been collecting actual examples of things I've used psusan for,
and now I think I have enough of them to make some kind of case for
why it's a useful tool. So I've written a man page, and dumped all my
collected examples in there.
In some applications of psusan, it's useful to establish a fixed
listening endpoint on a Unix-domain socket. You can make this happen
using an external helper program (effectively behaving like a
specialised inetd), but it's more convenient to have it built in to
psusan itself, and not really very difficult since Uppity had all the
necessary code already.
I've also added the --listen-once option from Uppity, and for good
measure, the --verbose option (so that psusan in listening mode can
show connections and disconnections on its original standard error).
'Uppity' is the name of a program that's only useful for debugging, so
I'd rather not have its name reused by psusan which I'm polishing up
to be actually useful to end users (if rather specialist ones).
So SshServerConfig now has an 'application name' field which is used
as the application name in the SSH banner, and Uppity sets it to
"Uppity" while psusan sets it to "PSUSAN".
Uppity's built-in SFTP server makes up its file handle identifiers
using random_read(). But when that server is reused in psusan, which
doesn't have the random number generator enabled, you get an assertion
failure.
I carefully set a 'finished' flag in the main source file on receipt
of the server_instance_terminated() callback, and then I plain forgot
to hook it up to the uxcliloop callback that says whether the program
should carry on running each time round the main loop. Now we actually
check the finished flag, and terminate the program if it's set.
This is a sweeping change applied across the whole code base by a spot
of Emacs Lisp. Now, everywhere I declare a vtable filled with function
pointers (and the occasional const data member), all the members of
the vtable structure are initialised by name using the '.fieldname =
value' syntax introduced in C99.
We were already using this syntax for a handful of things in the new
key-generation progress report system, so it's not new to the code
base as a whole.
The advantage is that now, when a vtable only declares a subset of the
available fields, I can initialise the rest to NULL or zero just by
leaving them out. This is most dramatic in a couple of the outlying
vtables in things like psocks (which has a ConnectionLayerVtable
containing only one non-NULL method), but less dramatically, it means
that the new 'flags' field in BackendVtable can be completely left out
of every backend definition except for the SUPDUP one which defines it
to a nonzero value. Similarly, the test_for_upstream method only used
by SSH doesn't have to be mentioned in the rest of the backends;
network Plugs for listening sockets don't have to explicitly null out
'receive' and 'sent', and vice versa for 'accepting', and so on.
While I'm at it, I've normalised the declarations so they don't use
the unnecessarily verbose 'struct' keyword. Also a handful of them
weren't const; now they are.
In the previous commit I introduced the ability for PuTTY to talk to a
server speaking the bare ssh-connection protocol, and listed several
applications for that ability. But none of those applications is any
use without a server that speaks the same protocol. Until now, the
only such server has been the Unix-domain socket presented by an
upstream connection-sharing PuTTY - and we already had a way to
connect to that.
So here's the missing piece: by reusing code that already existed for
the testing SSH server Uppity, I've created a program that will speak
the bare ssh-connection protocol on its standard I/O channels. If you
want to get a shell session over any of the transports I mentioned in
the last commit, this is the program you need to run at the far end of
it.
I have yet to write the documentation, but just in case I forget, the
name stands for 'Pseudo Ssh for Untappable, Separately Authenticated
Networks'.
