Hey all, to follow up on everyone’s how it works questions - teleconsole is a demo project built a while ago by Ev, our CEO to showcase the capabilities of https://github.com/gravitational/teleport

So how does this work behind the scenes?

Does the user have to trust the service provider, and can the service provider conceivably distribute malware or take control of the user's machine through this tool?

Cool question actually. We don’t terminate SSH, the server is used to distribute trust, so while technically possible that this could change, or there is some attack vector we did not think of, the implementation is careful to avoid that.

What do you mean by "distribute trust"?

Exchange trusted ssh CA public keys

That's cool. How does it differ from tmate.io though?

That's literally less than a 30 seconds read to figure out how this service is different from that tool.

From my understanding, you can use it even behind a NAT, whereas tmate does not handle this natively.

This one doesn't support read only access, from what I read.

Very cool but I just prefer to attach to a tmux session

Wouldn't this require you to setup your own SSH session? Or does tmux have remote sessions built-in?

Edit: I just realized you can join a session through the browser, meaning the opposite party wouldn't need teleconsole / tmux / screen installed. And you can even port forward for web development which is really nice. Not trying to attack tmux. I'm just trying to find the benefits of this.

You can forward a local ssh server port on a target host with ssh -R, then from the target host back to your localhost, then the other party just needs to ssh on the target host, without an NAT or firewall modification needed.

What about https://tmate.io/ ? It's a tmux fork.

Cool! I've not heard of tmate before. The only thing the opposite party would need is SSH installed (instead of being able to access through the browser). Though if you're working with a team of developers the chances are slim that they don't have that installed.

screen -x?

I was thinking `tmux attach`, but...yeah?

I think the difference between such a service and tmux attach or screen -x is that if person A wants to share a terminal with person B and that person A is behind a firewall / NAT, it would be painful to do without some kind of proxy (this is mentioned in the linked page be the way).

You have to trust the proxy though.

Facetime?