Thank you to Tim for suggesting today's application.
SSHMenu is a panel applet for GNOME that allows users to connect to remote computers over SSH with a single click.
As Tim explained in his suggestion e-mail:
[SSHMenu] is useful if you do a lot of work on servers or remote machines.
I definitely agree with that. Remembering the syntax for ssh is normally enough to foil me, but I'm sure it's even worse if you have a few different IP addresses and hostnames to remember.
The menu looks incredibly similar to the GNOME Applications menu, and it is fully customizable. The interface allows you to add seperators, submenus, and new entries really easy.
When you click on an entry, it opens up a new Terminal window connected to the specified SSH server. But, it isn't any old command line. From the SSHMenu site:
Here's a killer feature: imagine if every time you connected to a production server the terminal window had a red-tinted background, to remind you to tread carefully. Using terminal profiles, SSHMenu allows you to specify colours, fonts, transparency and a variety of other settings on a per-connection basis. You can even set window size and position.
Well, "killer" sums it up quite well. So how do you install this puppy? You can install it using Synaptic like I explain here, or you can paste the following into your favorite command line interface:
sudo apt-get install sshmenu sshmenu-gnomeAlright, now that you have it installed, you need to put SSHmenu on the panel. Right-click on an empty spot of the GNOME Panel, and select "Add to Panel...". Pick SSHmenu from the list, and it will run a wizard to generate a configuration file for you. To add more hosts, just click on SSHMenu and select "Preferences". More help for setting up this application can be found here.
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6 comments:
I think SSHMenu is only available in Ubuntu Hardy. You might want to mention that in your post as most of us are still running Gutsy.
Handy applet! Install instructions (for repos) can be found on the SSHMenu webpage, here.
No, you have to add a repository to synaptic. (how is found on the page)
You really should point this out in the article, as this will certainly mistify people.
Ger.
Sorry, but I don't see the advantage of such a tool. Don't get me wrong: I'm not against GUI-based applications, but when you need SSH you're probably going to type a lot anyway, so what's the advantage of SSHMenu vs. this?
alias ssh-home='ssh -p 6789 user@example.org'
alias ssh-work='ssh user@example.org'
This way you can stay in the shell.
I do a lot of this:
ssh -XC me@host application
Running my extension-loaded Firefox off of my faster machine remotely when I'm using my old kitchen laptop really saves CPU and makes the experience pleasant. I'd love to see a utility that would facilitate users making just these kinds of shortcuts, maybe browsing the remote menu and offering a choice of what to run or make a link for. Having just two boxes on a LAN gives you many advantages of a true-cluster. Fat word processors and such are also excellent to run off of another machine, preferably one with lots of ram.
Anyway, this applet looks cool. Anything that shows noobs the power of Linux on a LAN and ssh is good.
Oliver : Alternatively, you can create a ~/.ssh/config file and create your shortcuts in there.
The man page for ssh_config :
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ssh_config&sektion=5&manpath=OpenBSD
Personally, I'd love to see a GUI that modifies this file, so that any configs are replicated both in GUI and CLI.
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