SSH Remote Connections via Config

Thorsten has contributed the following ssh tip. Thanks Thorsten!

You wrote about ssh connects via gnome terminal:

http://dailyvim.blogspot.com/2008/09/gnome-terminal-tips.html

I'm using the config file of ssh to achieve the same goal:

just put the file "config" in your .ssh directory (chmod 600) with the
following lines:


host mysshhost
user root
identityfile /root/.ssh/my_ssh_key.ssh
port 34021
hostname 127.0.0.1
localforward 10100 localhost:10100
ForwardX11 yes


then back at the command line just try:

myhost:/ # ssh mysshhost

and voila, welcome to your ssh connected system (even the
bash-completion works with the config file, just do a ssh )

Question: Browsing Remote Filesystems

A Daily Vim reader asks the following question:

Travis, the feature that has me married to Kate (KDE text editor) is the file browser with bookmarks built in. Kate allows users to browse remote filesystems from within the app just like they could browse the local filesystem in a file manager. Furthermore, there is a bookmarks feature where users can bookmark specific directories / files on remote servers. Anythink like those two features in VIM?

Thanks!

Anybody have any ideas on this? I have a few ideas, but I'll wait and see if anybody else has a suggestions first.

Tar + SSH

If you want to transfer a directory structure from your local machine to a remote host, there are obviously a lot of ways to do this. You could use a recursive scp, an rsync, ftp (god forbid), or a variety of other techniques. Another way that's assuredly less popular but has the advantage of letting you specify the compression method and providing options to preserve attributes verbatim, is to use tar and ssh with the following syntax:

tar cvjf - * | ssh whoever@machine.com "(cd /path; tar xjf -)"

The previous example uses bzip2 compression, which may save time for large transfers. Thanks to Nate G. for contributing this tip.