(GalaxyMaster)'s mind drops

A while ago in the Transparent SSH host-jumping (Advanced) post I described a technique on how one could jump quite effortlessly through a chain of intermediate hosts. However, there was a catch: the user names and ports across the whole chain should be the same and there was no easy way to change that. Given that I recently paid quite a lot of attention to the ProxyCommand directive I decided to look into the implementation of a helper script that will allow one to tweak parameters for hosts in the chain.

I was involved in the creation of the sshephalopod project, which is an attempt to build an enterprise level authentication framework for SSH authentication using the SSH CA feature. The project is based on a wrapper script that signs a user via a SAML identity provider and gets user's public key signed for the further usage. In one of the discussions I pointed out that such a wrapper script is not good for the end user experience and I proposed to provide the users with an excerpt for their ssh config file, so the functionality of sshephalopod would be transparent to the general usage scenario of the ssh tool. The response was that ProxyCommand do not support interactivity. OK, as they say: The challenge is accepted :)