Today I nominate MOSH (Mobile Shell) from MIT in our “tool of the day” category.
With people working remote, we sometimes encounter connectivity issues. But even when working from a stable connection, it’s sometimes just a pest when you close your laptop even though you hadn’t quite finished looking at something on that SSH connection…
We tend to use a jumping box for connections to clients, so connections come from a known IP (for the firewalls) and where we have our end of VPN and such. On that box we now also have a MOSH server. It doesn’t replace the authentication part of SSH, but rather takes over afterwards and maintains an (encrypted) UDP path (it being UDP you can’t really call it a connection).
Now you can change IPs, close your laptop lid, see your ADSL connection retrain, and all will be well anyway. MOSH will warn you when a connection is (temporarily) gone but it’ll automatically sort out the reconnection for you. And depending on what you’re doing, you can actually keep typing locally. Even roaming between wifi and mobile will not break things.
There’s more to it, but the important thing is that now you know it exists! The MOSH site at MIT is simple but clear, and fairly complete including instructions how to install and use on pretty much any platform. Have you tried MOSH already? Send us your thoughts.