[rescue] MacOS X: First Thoughts

[linc]

Responding to the message of <200108041705.f74H5JU24313 at omsk.bungi.com>
from "Greg" <gonufer at yahoo.com>:
> 
> > > Let's see... in recent releases OpenSSH has managed to:
> > >
> > > 	- corrupt my utmp/wtmp files preventing me from being able
> > > 	  to login to the machine it was running on.
> > > 	- started sending SSHv2 messages to SSHv1 clients causing
> > > 	  them to choke and die (fix submitted to the maintainers
> > > 	  and accepted; bug exists in 2.9p2)
> > > 	- had real bugs found by lint that were only recently fixed
> > > 	  (routines that are supposed to return a pointer falling off
> > > 	  off the end and returning garbage on error conditions, printf
> > > 	  statements with the wrong number of arguments for their format
> > > 	  format strings, etc.)
> > 
> > You know what though, the only thing this means is that OpenSSH wasn't
> > ported very well to Solaris....  I am sure one of you Solaris junkies out
> > there will have it working great soon.  I will tell you though OpenSSH on
> > NetBSD, or Linux, or SCO, or FreeBSD, or OpenBSD works fantastic.
> 
> Out of the problems I listed, only the utmp/wtmp corruption bug is specific
> to SunOS (and was fixed before 2.9p2).  The rest of the problems are all
> completely generic and affect all platforms OpenSSH runs on (they're all
> in common code, not platform-specific code).
> 
> Oh, and I forgot one of the biggest regression in OpenSSH 2.9 (that affects
> _all_ platforms, even the alternative ones):
> 
> 	- Forwarded ports could not be connected to from other machines,
> 	  only "localhost"
> 
> That was a major pain since I rely on forwarded ports through my firewall
> but it affected so many people that a patch was posted pretty darn quickly.
> 
> Here are some other recent problems:
> 
> And on MacOS X it has problems with the OS' getaddrinfo and can fail to
> connect to certain hosts.  Patches were sent to the openssh mailing list
> by a MacOS X user.  MacOS X needs "BROKEN_GETADDRINFO" defined to 1.
> 
> Apple apparently compiled OpenSSH with the wrong endianness specification
> for rijndel and aes128-cbc will not interoperate with other machines.  (this
> one is Apple's fault).  Workaround is to build your own, you probably do
> anyways.  People report that MacOS X Updates overwrite their own OpenSSH
> installation so be careful.
> 
> Many Linux users are reporting problems with ssh hanging on exit, no
> definitive fix yet AFAICT.
> They also report data loss with ssh -n (and also when using ssh
> from cron), output is truncated.
> 
> Forwarding of IPv4 ports fails when OpenSSH is using IPv6 (on Linux, at
> least).
> 
> Yes, OpenSSH is _fantastic_!
> 
> -greg
> .

Never had any of these problems under Linux.  Ever.
-Linc.