Life of a #Remotee

I work remotely for Red Hat. Primarily at home but also in a coffee shop with several co-workers. And, oh yeah, forgot to mention, I travel heavily.
So I need to be able to work remote. But I don't want to take all my gear with me, so I leave some of it at home and plugged in. And mosh allows me to connect/reconnect etc.

I (re-)discovered mosh last weekend when prepping for a trip. I didn't want to carry my bulky laptop to the mountains that day, so I set up remote access through my cable modem. Of course, it's trivial to set up a port forward from my new Google Wifi AP and routers to my home machine. But that gives you connectivity, not persistence. So I pulled down the "mobile shell" mosh and set it up quickly.

IT JUST WORKS.®™

I decided to do this blog post after typing internally:

So, I started a mosh session from home to home last Sunday. I've been to Denver Airport. on-board a Southwest flight, Saint Louis hotel, Saint Louis enterprise customer, and back, and that session just keeps running. I had heard of mosh before but using it is even easier. I used to "work around" this with screen sessions but mosh is even simpler than that.

So, setup is easy peasy. Install mosh. Find a UDP port you can forward back to your persistent (home) node. You probably also want to forward back a TCP port for ssh.

mosh --ssh="ssh -p$SOMEPORT" -p $SOMEUDP  $HOMEIP

You can find your home ip (from home) with this:

export HOMEIP=$(curl ifconfig.co) # but I save this to a file as well so maybeexport HOMEIP=$(curl ifconfig.co |tee ~/bin/myhomeip)

You can port forward the default ssh port (22) or something slightly more obscure. The default UDP port range for mosh starts at 60000 through 61000. I picked a port in that range.

Both the SOMEPORT and SOMEUDP need port forwarded (using your router setup) to the actual node you want to use.

One other thing you will want to check out as a #remotee is wireguard. I'll write it up once I've switched my vpn-ness over to it. Wireguard currently uses some packages to install a kernel module that gets built with out of tree dpdk.  See wireguard, hat tip to Jess Frazelle for Dockerfiles mentioning Wireguard and oh yeah, this guy.