Curious what folks are using to organise their remote connections? I liked WinSSHTerm and have tried replacing it with Remote Desktop Manager, but it seems a bit broken (fonts look terrible in a terminal, sftp doesn’t work, RDP sort of works, but it’s not great).
RDP is not a must. Folders, ssh, key auth, sftp and scp are the main things I’m looking for. Currently considering Remmina but though I would check if ppl have strong views on this topic before trying the next app.
I’m using cinnamon with mint 22.
ssh config? Not sure what you’re looking for. Like a list of preconfigured connections?
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A graphical interface to store and sort the remote connections. I have 20+ remote systems I need to maintain and apps like this provide tabbed experience like a browser to connect to them.
If you’re dead set on a GUI for this, I guess you’d be in the minority which is why you’re probably not finding a lot out there.
I think Remmina does this though, and it’s solid as an RDP client otherwise.
Yeah seems like Remmina is it. Termius looks nice but the price doesn’t make sense.
Surprising that not many Linux sysadmins want a central console with folders for SSH, file copy and remote desktop connections.
As everyone keeps saying…it’s just not a thing that actual sysadmins or fluent users need. Using ssh configs is essentially the same thing that you’re looking for, but you’re just typing alias hostnames instead of clicking on them. Otherwise absolutely no difference. Not many people are connecting by IP address or anything like that.
It absolutely isn’t the same, but I appreciate learning that this is how many linux admins manage their connections.
Why do you think it’s not? What feature would a GUI have that’s not trivial in a terminal?
I’ve explained this at length?
Single app with unified hierarchy for all systems sorted by work, home, client, prod, staging. Within each you can choose to use SSH or VNC or RDP or SFTP or scp. When copying files there’s a side by side GUI so you can browse easily. I have done this using various apps in windows for 20 years and couldn’t imagine tracking all those servers/routers/devices without a central console.
It is obviously not the same as manually making all these connections and using different apps for each of them and backing them up with git.
A single app is not necessarily a good thing, I would argue that you’re already using multiple apps on your day-to-day work, and it would be better if remote connectivity were integrated into those. For example, you mentioned a side-by-side view of two locations, this is a normal workflow on day-to-day even without remote access, sometimes you want to have your file explorer split the view in two and look at two folders simultaneously to perform operations, ideally this exact same flow should be able to connect to any remote host and show it to you seamlessly, so you can use the same flow for copying stuff from folder A to folder B regardless of the folders being in different machines.
Unified hierarchy doesn’t make much sense for remote connections. I see why you would want to have some organization as in groups of machines, but I don’t understand what you mean by hierarchy. In any case ssh/config is a unified source of truth for this that all of the commands you mentioned (and many more) use when trying to connect remotely via ssh.
You know the name of the tool, what’s the problem with using the tool directly? For ssh you’re going to be dropped in a terminal, so starting in a terminal should be acceptable, for VNC or RDP whatever client you use should be able to parse the ssh/config files so you’re not duplicating information, for SFTP or SCP you should be using your default file explorer as of the other machine were a different folder, there’s no need to have a separate app for it (also you should consider looking at rsync since it’s much better than naively copying files over).
I know it’s not the same as you’re used to, but it’s one of the core differences in philosophy from Windows to Linux. The philosophy on Unix in general os for an app to do one thing, but do it well, so it’s much more common to use different apps for different stuff than having a monolithic app that does everything but nothing perfectly. That being said, the closest I know of for what you’re asking is Remmina, although I use it only for RDP since for ssh and rsync I prefer a terminal (and since I have the hosts configured I get tab completion as if they were local folders). That being said I only have a handful of machines to connect to, so I don’t need any sort of organization on them, and when I had dozens of machines to attend to I used Ansible and other stuff to perform bulk actions per group and other maintenance stuff.
I hope Remmina works for you, or that you find something that does, unfortunately I think that might be very hard because of the philosophical differences from Linux to Windows, in general Linux users prefer that their default file manager be able to connect via ssh using the default ssh configs than a secondary ssh manager that can browse files but is neither the source of truth for ssh nor the default file manager. I know I keep using the same example, but it is very telling of the difference in philosophies (and yes, most if not all of the file explorers in Linux can in fact connect via ssh using your default configs).
I mean, that’s the whole unix philosophy. Rather than one big monolithic app, we use dozens of tiny ones that can all be scripted and work together. I think I’d just use an org-mode file to create the sort of centralized UI you’re describing.
I’ve yet to find anything more efficient than opening my shell and typing
sshorscp. Remote desktop is irrelevant to me because none of the systems I administrate will ever have a GUI.EDIT: tab auto completion also makes things far, far smoother.
I’ve found that if you’re using ssh then taking your hands off the keyboard to grab a mouse just to click a different tab is slow and annoying.
I use a terminal multiplexer, tmux, and just keep different sessions open for each server that I need to connect to.
There’s a ton of hotkeys and plugins that can handle essentially anything you’d like to do. Once you learn the few hotkeys (print a cheatsheet and force yourself to use the hotkeys).
Tmux is awesome. We’ve somehow fallen into using screen at work, I think just old habits. So yes, on the other side of the ssh connections there’s usually a series of screen sessions for us to join. Should try to move onto tmux - it is nicer.
You can have multiple ssh config files, with includes, to keep the configurations structured and organized, and not one long dump file, then use any gui terminal app that supports tabs. And tab+auto complete hostnames from the said configs. Some apps also support something like multiple profiles, so you can put there your ssh <host> command, if you want some gui lists. I follow this approach and it is very portable, as the only thing I need to care about are my config files.
I dunno. The folders keep things sorted between work and home. And within work each client. And within there the prod and staging systems are separated. I guess I could make separate scripts for each host but that’s kind of what I want the manager for. Also not sure how this covers the right click, copy files workflow of scp or sftp.