First of all, I would like to congratulate and thank you for this amazing job.
Honestly, I don't know any connection manager tool with so many useful features like this one.
That said, I would like to sugest a couple of improvements, that at least for me, a non-programmer end-user, really doesn't sounds something too hard to be put in place
1) Ability to add "Local Shell"s to clusters
Sometimes we may want to compare dirs contents or installed packages list, from a local and a remote workstation. In circunstances like that (and others) would be usefull to have clusterized the local and remote connection to run the same commands on both
2) Ability to rename tab label from command line (probably using escape sequence)
In my current assingment, I don't have direct access to all servers that I need to support. Most of then I an only able to connect thru a gateway server.
For the most acceessed servers I had configured a connection with the appropriate tab label, and using the amazing "expect" feature, I automatically jump from the gateway to the destination server ... However, I have hundreds of servers to support and can't configure an individual connection to each, so, what I usually do is open the connection to the gateway server, and from there, issue a new ssh command, and then, manually rename the tab label.
If I were able to programatically rename the tab using a escape sequence, I could add to my .profile something to handle it automatically
3) SFTP syntax error on RHEL6
I have my laptop running RHEL6 (and don't have a change to replace it!) and I can't imagine why, but the SFTP sintax on RHEL6 is different then Debian or others distros. When I try to start a SFTP session on PAC, On RHEL both "-P <port>" and "-i <cert. file>" are invalid (such options should be handled using "-o ssh_option")... When I try to open a SFT connection I get this:
sftp: illegal option -- i
usage: sftp [-1Cv] [-B buffer_size] [-b batchfile] [-F ssh_config]
[-o ssh_option] [-P sftp_server_path] [-R num_requests]
[-S program] [-s subsystem | sftp_server] host
sftp [user@]host[:file ...]
sftp [user@]host[:dir[/]]
sftp -b batchfile [user@]host
<-= DISCONNECTED (PRESS <ENTER> TO RECONNECT)
Due corporate restrictions, I am also not able to replace the installed /usr/bin/sftp binary with something else. But I noticed that PSFTP (that came with PuTTY) uses the same syntax expected by PAC. In that way I would suggest to:
a) identify the running distro (programatically, or using a flag on Global Preferences) and handle SFTP with the apropriate sintax; or
b) embed a PSFTP copy (since it is open source, there would be no restriction) and use it, regardless the running distro
Regards,
and once more, thanks for this amazing job
Renato
Hi!
First of all, thank you so much for your interest in PAC!!
Now, let's see:
- point 1: done! Now, local shells "inherit" are simple "terminal" classes (stay tuned for next PAC release)
- point 2: done! Because of how PAC works, it's really difficult to find a good/simple/beauty/compatible solution, but I found an interesting approach: by pressing <ctrl><shift>g (or choosing that option on right-click menu), PAC will launch a "hostname" command (available in both window$ and unix worlds) and will retrieve it's output, setting it as temporal title for actual window/tab
- point 3: mmm... weird... let me think about it! :)
Once again, thank you so much for participating!!
- David.