In most Halibut man pages I write, I have a standard convention of
referring to another man page by wrapping the page name in \cw and the
section number in \e, leaving the parentheses un-marked-up. Apparently
I forgot in this particular collection.
When UML terminates, it kills its entire process group. The way PuTTY
invokes proxy processes, they are part of its process group. So if UML
is used directly as the proxy process, it will commit patricide on
termination.
Wrapping it in 'setsid' is overkill (it doesn't need to be part of a
separate _session_, only a separate pgrp), but it's good enough to
work around this problem, and give PuTTY the opportunity to shut down
cleanly when the UML it's talking to vanishes.
Ian Jackson recently tried to use the recipe in the psusan manpage for
talking to UML, and found that the connection was not successfully set
up, because at some point during startup, UML read the SSH greeting
(ok, the bare-ssh-connection greeting) from its input fd and threw it
away. So by the time psusan was run by the guest init process, the
greeting wasn't there to be read.
Ian's report: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=991958
I was also able to reproduce this locally, which makes me wonder why I
_didn't_ notice it when I originally wrote that part of the psusan man
page. It worked for me before, honest! But now it doesn't.
Anyway. The ssh verstring module already has a mode switch to decide
whether we ought to send our greeting before or after waiting for the
other side's greeting (because that decision varies between client and
server, and between SSH-1 and SSH-2). So it's easy to implement an
override that forces it to 'wait for the server greeting first'.
I've added this as yet another bug workaround flag. But unlike all the
others, it can't be autodetected from the server's version string,
because, of course, we have to act on it _before_ seeing the server's
greeting and version string! So it's a manual-only flag.
However, I've mentioned it in the UML section of the psusan man page,
since that's the place where I _know_ people are likely to need to use
this flag.
I've just spent the afternoon playing with it (rather belatedly - this
is the first time I've tried it out since it was first announced!),
and quickly decided that on the one hand it looks quite useful, but on
the other hand, running it in a Windows console is not for me and I'd
prefer to talk to it via PuTTY and psusan, for nicer copy-paste
controls and the ability to forward Pageant into it.
That turns out to be very easy and (I think) useful, so in it goes as
another psusan use case.
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.
