PuTTY/Irssi/ssh/screen hints

This how I personally use the combination of the above software, comments are welcome.

• PuTTY

  I use my own patched version, with an icon (makes it easier to spot).

  Turned unicode on, using SSH keys with Pageant so my laptop suspend patch works (make sure automatic username entering is on).

  I've configured the session so that it'll auto-reconnect to screen with a seperate script (so if I want to change it I don't need to update 5 configs on different machines, etc) like this:
  

  #!/bin/bash
  screen -DRSU irssi irssi
  

  Minimisation award goes to yatesy.

• OpenSSH

  Isn't much to go here, the default setup is fine for just about all purposes.

  Something of interest may be my little ssh-tunnel program:

  #include <sys/types.h>
  #include <unistd.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  #include <sys/wait.h>
  #include <sys/signal.h>
  #include "options.h"
  #include <sys/fcntl.h>
  
  pid_t child = 0;
  
  void handler(int signal) {
    if(child > 0) {
      kill(child, SIGKILL);
      child = 0;
    }
    exit(0);
  }
  
  int main(void) {
    int fd;
    if(fork())
      exit(0);
  
    close(STDIN_FILENO);
    close(STDOUT_FILENO);
    close(STDERR_FILENO);
  
    fd = open("/dev/null", O_RDWR);
    if(fd < 0)
      exit(0);
  
    if((dup(fd) < 0) || (dup(fd) < 0))
      exit(0);
  
    if(setsid() == -1)
      exit(0);
  
    signal(SIGKILL, handler);
    signal(SIGTERM, handler);
  
    while(1) {
      child = fork();
      if(child == 0) {
        execl("/usr/bin/ssh", "-T", "-q", "-N", "-L", LOCAL, REMOTE, 0);
        exit(0);
      } else if (child != -1) {
        if(waitpid(child, NULL, 0) == -1)
          exit(0);
      } else {
        exit(0);
      }
      child = 0;
      sleep(10);
    }
    return 0;
  }
  

• Screen

  Here's the contents of my .screenrc file:

  terminfo xterm|xterm-color|xterm-xfree86|rxvt hs:ts=\E]0;:fs=\007:ds=\E]0;\007
  msgwait 2
  msgminwait 0
  vbell off
  nonblock on
  

  The terminfo line allows the xterm title escaping to 'go through' the screen session to PuTTY.

  Non-blocking mode makes sure when your connection dies, your screen session won't block ('hang').

  These lines in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config also seem to help with this problem:

  ClientAliveInterval 5
  ClientAliveCountMax 3
  

• Irssi
  • Scripts I've only got a few interesting home written scripts loaded, mostly one that corrects lame speech, a window cleanup script and my secure Q auth script.
    I should probably upload my encrypted onconnect script with a built in scripting language, but it needs reviewing.
  • Aliases
  Few interesting ones here:

  blockn     script exec \@b = split /:/, "$*", 2\; Irssi::active_win->command("msg O block -h $_ 1d $b[1]") foreach(split / /, $b[0])
  checks     script exec Irssi::active_win->command("check $_") foreach(split / /, "$*")
  cidr       exec - /usr/bin/perl -we 'use Net::CIDR\; foreach (split / /, "$*") { print join(" ", Net::CIDR::range2cidr("$_")) . " " }'
  suspenduse script exec \@b = split /:/, "$*", 2\; Irssi::active_win->command("msg Q suspenduser #$_ $b[1]") foreach(split / /, $b[0])
  wallusersp script exec Irssi::active_win->command("wallusers $_") foreach (split /\\n/, `$*`);
  

  Note you NEED to be careful with what you feed these aliases, most notably with any escape characters. I don't know a way round this, please contact me if you do!
  • Theme
  I've got my own niceish looking theme, however it's interwined with my config file, I'll probably seperate it out one day.