Now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I am catching up with all the RSS feeds, news, and announcements that I’ve missed recently. One of them was the release of OpenSSH 5.4 – a tool for pretty much every Linux user. There are a few interesting bits in the changelog:
Added a ‘netcat mode’ to ssh(1): “ssh -W host:port …” This connects stdio on the client to a single port forward on the server. This allows, for example, using ssh as a ProxyCommand to route connections via intermediate servers.
and
Add a ‘read-only’ mode to sftp-server(8) that disables open in write mode and all other fs-modifying protocol methods.
Also, it was mentioned that sftp got a whole lot of improvements, including tab completion, user-friendly sizes option, recursive transfers, etc.
Overall, a very welcome release.