SSHMenu 3.12 review

SSHMenu is a GNOME panel applet* that makes all your regular SSH connections a single mouse click away

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Grant McLean

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SSHMenu is a GNOME panel applet* that makes all your regular SSH connections a single mouse click away. Here's a screenshot to give you the basic idea.

Each menu option will open an SSH session in a new terminal window. You can arrange groups of hosts with separator bars or sub-menus. You can even open all the connections on a submenu (in separate windows or tabs) with one click.

Here's a killer feature: imagine if every time you connected to a production server the terminal window had a red background. Every connection you make using using SSHMenu will use the terminal profile you've selected, to set the colour scheme, terminal font and other settings.

The Host Connection Details dialog allows you to specify:

the name used to display the host on the menu
connection parameters
window size and location (optional)
GNOME terminal profile (for colours and font sizes etc)

In the example illustrated above, the 'Server Log' host entry will connect to the server 'snoopy' and run 'tail' to watch the Apache log file on that server. The output will be displayed in a 120 character by 10 line window in the bottom right corner of the screen.

You can also add ssh options before the hostname. A common example would be '-AX hostname' to enable forwarding of SSH agent and X11 protocols respectively. You can add other options for port forwarding or other host-specific connection parameters.

SSHMenu also includes a configuration 'wizard' that will be invoked the first time you add the applet to your panel. The wizard will look in your .ssh/known_hosts file and build a menu with any hosts it finds. Of course, no hosts will be found if you have the 'HashKnownHosts' option enabled in your ssh_config (this is the default on recent versions of Ubuntu at least).

The Preferences dialog allows you to reorder host items; add separators; and organise items into sub-menus.

Requirements:
GTK+ version 2.2.x
Ruby
Ruby-GNOME2
OpenSSH

What's New in This Release:
This minor release adds a workaround for problems with older GTK libraries on Debian Sarge; and adds improved error handling and reporting around reading the config file and loading custom code.