autossh mit Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, zypper, scoop installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Upstream-Dokumentation
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• autossh
• rscreen

Projektgeschichte

The official README traces autossh's idea to rstunnel, Reliable SSH Tunnel. Early autossh releases changed the monitoring mechanism from the original rstunnel-style idea to a loop of SSH forwardings and later added support for a remote echo service.

The CHANGES file records version 1.1 as the initial release, then shows the program growing through practical tunnel-management fixes: startup gate handling, monitor-port behavior, signal handling, backgrounding, pid files, autoconf support, and compatibility with OpenSSH option changes.

Adoptionsgeschichte

autossh spread through Unix package systems because it solves an operationally boring but persistent problem: keeping reverse tunnels, long-lived forwards, and remote sessions running. The official page notes availability in OpenBSD and FreeBSD ports, Cygwin, and some Linux distributions; the input records packages across Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Alpine, Arch, MacPorts, Nix, Scoop, and zypper ecosystems.

Wie es verwendet wird

The normal invocation is `autossh -M port[:echo_port] [ssh options]`. autossh owns only a few flags, notably the monitor port, foreground/background behavior, and version output; most arguments are passed through to ssh.

For modern OpenSSH, the README documents `-M 0` to disable monitor ports and rely on SSH exit behavior, often paired with `ServerAliveInterval`, `ServerAliveCountMax`, and `ExitOnForwardFailure`. This is why autossh is common in init scripts, launch agents, simple service units, and admin one-liners.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

autossh is the sort of tiny package that persists because it does exactly one sysadmin job and has almost no policy surface. Package maintainers care about it because it sits at the intersection of OpenSSH option churn, daemon supervision, legacy Unix platforms, and service startup semantics.

Zeitleiste

• Version 1.1: Initial release recorded in upstream CHANGES.
• Version 1.2: Major restructuring added looped forwarded ports for connection tests and backoff after rapid failures.
• Version 1.3: Remote echo-service monitoring and SIGUSR1 restart behavior added.
• Version 1.4: Basic GNU autoconf support and pid-file support added.
• 2019: Version 1.4g update noted on the official homepage.

Related projects

• OpenSSH: autossh supervises the ssh client and passes through most options.
• rstunnel: upstream credits it as the original idea.
• screen: upstream mentions use with screen for persistent sessions.

Quellen

• https://www.harding.motd.ca/autossh
• https://www.harding.motd.ca/autossh/CHANGES.txt
• https://www.harding.motd.ca/autossh/README.txt
• source_facts.package-manager