ETERNAL TERMINAL
SSH replacement for persistent connections
Shashank Sharma cheerfully whistles the Knight Rider theme when connecting to remote machines because of the smart SSH replacement.
Shashank Sharma
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is an avid Arch user and a trial lawyer based in Delhi. He’s always on the look-out for geeky memorabilia.
ASSH connection is typically used to connect with remote machines. It works on a client/ server model, in that the machine being used to connect to a remote machine is called a client, while the latter is the server. To establish the connection with the remote machine, you must know its IP address, as well as the username/password to authenticate the connection. Because the connection is based on IP address, any change in the IP address automatically breaks the SSH connection, turning even mild-mannered users into rage monsters.
Released under Apache license, Eternal Terminal can be used as a replacement for SSH. Its call to fame is the ability to re-establish connection to a remote machine without user intervention. This is in sharp contrast to SSH connections, which once terminated have to be re-established manually.
Depending on the distribution running on your remote machine, you might not be able to create an Eternal Terminal session when you first run the et command.
If you encounter a Could not reach the ET server: :[port] error, this means that the remote machine doesn’t allow incoming connection on the specified port.
You can either change the configuration to use a port, which is open for use, or alternatively open a port for Eternal Terminal. How you do this will depend on the distribution and the firewall utility. For instance, Fedora users can open a port with the sudo firewall-cmd add-port=2022/tcp command. You can list all open ports with the sudo firewall-cmd --list-ports command.
If you’re using UFW however, such as on Ubuntu, you’ll have to run the sudo ufw allow command to open the specified port. You can then run the sudo ufw status verbose command to confirm that the specified port is now open.
Should you encounter any other problems with Eternal Terminal, you’ll likely find answers in issues section on the GitHub page. It’s a popular project and many common issues, such as lack of colours in the output of ls command and X11 forwarding workaround have already been addressed and closed by the developer.