SSH (and tunnel) In One Click of a Mouse

      by Wyatt Walter

I can’t believe I haven’t seen this tool before. Worse yet, I can’t believe how much time I must have wasted SSH’ing to hosts. Tonight I discovered SSHMenu for Gnome.

I’m a systems administrator on a mostly Linux network (but with a few Windows hosts). Given that, I rely on SSH a lot. A lot, as in you probably wouldn’t catch me not SSH’d into something at any moment during my work day.

SSHMenu

SSHMenu

I do find that I tend to SSH into the same machines over and over again as well as have a few ports that I forward through the firewall that are not exposed to the outside of our DMZ. With SSHMenu, I can not only save a set of the machines that I log into often, but I can also pass options like port forwarding and others.

To get SSHMenu, you’re just a sudo apt-get install away:
sudo apt-get install sshmenu-gnome

To enable it, you’ll need to add it to your Gnome panel by right clicking on the panel and going to the “Add to panel..” window.

Add to panel window

Add to panel window

You can then begin adding hosts in the SSHMenu preferences. The program passes the options you include in the hostname field into the SSH utilitiy so you can insert things like usernames and options as you please. For me, I setup my tunnels so I don’t have to type them in all the time. The one that I saved went a little something like this (with hostnames modified to protect the innocent):
user@host.domain.com -L 8888:windowshost.domain.com:3389

With a couple of clicks of a button I can be not only SSH’d in, but have a tunnel setup to connect via my RDP client (for my example).

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (4) : Jul 15th, 2009

  • http://grantmclean.vox.com/ Grant McLean

    You said “two clicks of a mouse”. Did you know that you can make a connection with only one click? Click down on the applet to display the menu, drag the mouse to select the host and release the mouse button: click down, drag, release :-)

    I’m glad you found SSHMenu useful. Stay tuned for an upcoming release.

    • http://whatan00b.com Wyatt Walter

      Ah, well played! I think I’ve been using it like that lately and just not thinking about it :)

      I did find it very useful. Looking forward to seeing what’s next!

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  • JohnP

    Controlling the WM has been possible for 30+ yrs – no panel needed or config program needed. If you don’t use gnome, like many of us, you can edit your WM or DE environment to provide the same result.

    For example, in LXDE just edit the ~/.config/lxpanel/LXDE/panels/top to add your ssh commands.

    A sample command is: xterm -sb -e ssh uid@server
    Use any terminal that you like.