I have to go through a gateway box to get to various production boxes; this gets rather tiresome because you end up doing things like:
ssh gateway enter password<ENTER> ssh boxireallywanted enter password<ENTER>
Do this a few thousand times and it starts to get old. Being slightly clever, I’d tried ssh gateway ssh boxiwant, but that doesn’t work because a tty isn’t allocated so password entry can’t happen (and keys aren’t possible for me). Today, I finally found the magic should-have-known-it command line magic to fix this - -t:
ssh -t gateway ssh -t boxireallywanted
Enter both passwords and you’re in. This makes it possible to set up window manager shortcuts for the various boxes I need to get to.
Yes, this qualifies as excitement in my world.
Posted by Bill Stilwell at April 27, 2004 10:35 AM