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Comment by CGamesPlay

5 days ago

Using nonstandard ports would break the `ssh foo.exe.dev` pattern.

This could also have been solved by requiring users to customize their SSH config (coder does this once per machine, and it applies to all workspaces), but I guess the exe.dev guys are going for a "zero-config, works anywhere" experience.

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CGamesPlay

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hrmtst93837  5 days ago

Zero-config usually means the complexity got shoved somewhere less visible. An SSH config is fine for one box, but with a pile of ephemeral workspaces it turns into stale cruft fast and half the entries is for hosts you forgot existed.

The port issue is also boringly practical. A lot of corp envs treat 22 as blessed and anything else as a ticket, so baking the routing into the name is ugly but I can see why they picked it, even if the protocool should have had a target name from day one.

  • CGamesPlay  4 days ago

    SSH configs support wildcards, so if you couple it with a ProxyCommand you can an arbitrary level of dynamism for a host pattern (like *.exe.dev).

    But yeah, everything is a trade-off.

KomoD  4 days ago

Too bad most SSH clients don't seem to support SRV records, they would've been perfect for this:

  ;; Domain:     mydomain.com.
  ;; SSH running on port 2999 at host 1.2.3.4

  ;; A Record
  vm1928.mydomain.com. 1 IN A 1.2.3.4

  ;; SRV Record
  _ssh._tcp.vm1928.mydomain.com. 1 IN SRV 0 0 2999 vm1928.mydomain.com.

If supported it would result in just being able to do "ssh vm1928.mydomain.com" without having to add "-p 1928"