At @work we have some remote developers that were tired of dealing with lost SSH connections. We looked into mosh but had some security concerns (nothing in particular, mosh is awesome), so in the interim I thought some vanilla SSH+screen might do the job. This is the result.

rassh is pretty simple. It executes ssh, telling it to run screen on the remote host when connected. A symlink is made from ~/.ssh/rassh_auth_socket to wherever the real auth socket is. This symlink is maintained between disconnects so agent forwarding should keep working.

Simply:

rassh foo.example.com

And you'll now have a login session on the remote host that will survive jittery networks. Yay!

Various command line options are available to customize rassh' behavior. They can be found with:

rassh help

Just copy the rassh standalone script to some location such as ~/bin or /usr/bin. rassh requires perl and ssh. The remote system must have screen installed.

• mosh
• autossh
• autossh + tmux = smux

• Added the --sleep= and --retries= options.

• More reasonable flapping timing.
• Added documentation via --help, -h, or help.
• Exit earlier if the initial connection fails.
• Added the --screen-cmd and --no-screen-cmd options for those that don't like the default bash --login.
• Began spreading rassh!

To contribute to rassh you can open an issue or make a fork and submit a pull request.

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Aran Deltac

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.