Wow! Just discovered something cool.

brian_at_aljex.com
Date: 01/20/05 

Date: 19 Jan 2005 18:12:07 -0800

A few weeks ago I had compiled the latest version of Midnight Commander
for Open Server.

I only just now discovered something new it has and didn't expect it to
work even when I did see it's description in the help.

2-panel "text gui" sftp file browsing!

If you have two Open Server boxes, and they both have ssh, you can use
a feature called "shell link" in the left/right panel menus and it
works just like the "ftp filesystem" option that's been there forever.

You put in the other systems address and it will use ssh to connect to
the other system, prompt you for the password if necessary, and then
you have beutiful 2-panel browsing just like gui ftp clients.

The ftp version of that feature has been in there since forever, but it
was buggy on sco, often a file transfer would hang forever.
I think it just doesn't know how to parse some message from either
sco's ftp server or client.
Plus, we all know it's not good to ftp with a password anymore.
This seems to be behaving itself as far as getting stuck and it's ssh.
Probably why it doesn't get stuck is the ssh is the same openssh that
the mc authors are using on linux. No more clear passwords, only one
tcp port, no more passive/normal ftp difficulties with nat routers.
This is huge.

The docs say the remote end needs a "fish server or a bash compatible
shell" I don't use bash on osr5 anywhere but it works on plain (sco) sh
and ksh.

the binary is at ftp://pcunix.com/pub/bkw/mc.tar.bz2 and
http://www.aljex.com/bkw/sco/mc.tar.bz2
I believe it needs gwxlibs unfortunately.

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