kdessh (was: Re: What about Kfloppy and SuperKaramba)

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi,

meanwhile I finally have found the email from the original author, Geert 
Jansen, he sent when asked about the purpose of kdessh in January:
"
kdessh is the remote equivalent of kdesu. It allows you to run a KDE
application on a remote host, potentially under a different UID,
without hassle. It takes care of things like setting up X cookies, ICE
cookies, DCOP (is that still used?) and $DISPLAY.

I am not sure how much this is used. It has limited use for a single
desktop use case but could be useful in bigger organisations where
you'd like to run applications remotely.
"
So kdessh is not a real GUI program on it's own, but a GUI-enabled pre-program 
to run remote programs. Like you would put into a command for a menu entry:
	kdessh remotehost cool-hardware-bounded-program

Samedi, le 12 decembre 2009, à 08:21, Michael Leupold a écrit:
> btw, it seems kdessh is meant to run an application on a remote host,
> providing means to gather and store the password using a kde gui. however
>  it seems it doesn't really work (I couldn't observe anything running
>  kdesshing into my machine).

Tonight I had some look into the code of kdessh: It currently doesn't work at 
all. So it really needs to be moved from kdeutils, to playground, or rather to 
tags/unmaintained (as it might solve it's problem on the wrong level). Will do 
once the beta2 tarballs are finished, no need to blog about this.

The trick of kdessh is to not directly ask ssh to execute the command the user 
gave, but instead first start kdesu_stub (from kdelibs/kdesu) and pass it all 
the environment settings so that the actually started program integrates as 
much as possible into the local workspace. Also using KDE dialogs (but not 
KWallet for caching the passwords).
Now, "ssh -X" meanwhile does at least care for some of this, X cookies and 
$DISPLAY.
And worse, kdesu_stub has been moved to lib/kde4/libexec/kdesu_stub due to the 
name clash with the KDE3 version. So it isn't in the path and the ssh-server 
does not find it and cannot start it. That's why it doesn't work at all now. 
Hm, perhaps kdesu_stub could be renamed to kdesu_stub4...

IMHO all what kdessh does should rather be solved by hooks and plugins into 
ssh, or? Isn't it already, by stuff named agents or that?

And does someone of you have experience how wiring a remotely running program 
into the local Session D-Bus works?

Cheers
Friedrich
-- 
Okteta - KDE Hex Editor - http://utils.kde.org/projects/okteta