ssh over a High-Latency Connection
I’m in the process of transferring this blog and the Rivulus website over to a RootBSD VPS. I like my current web host, Little Oak, and strongly recommend them to anyone who needs basic web hosting service: they are Mac-friendly and provide great customer service; but I really was starting to feel hindered by not having full shell access. I mean, I really need the ability to trash my entire website with an errant ‘/’…
So anyway, I’m going to a VPS. And since Linux is just way too popular (and I have a mild philosophical disagreement with the GNU license), I decided that I had to have FreeBSD. RootBSD seems to be one of a handful of places offering FreeBSD VPSes. After about 24 hours, I am absolutely thrilled with what I’ve got.
Now, to the subject of this post. Living deep in the boonies, I use satellite for all my internet access. Overall I’m quite pleased with the service, though I wish it cost about a 1/3 of what it does. The major downside is the latency: pings to my VPS are running between 700 and 1110 ms. This makes ssh very difficult to use: press a key, it takes about a second for it register on the terminal. My solution has been to use putty (PuTTY, if you insist) with local echo and local line editing enabled. The local line editing tends to cause problems with anything other than the command line (emacs, ports install screens, etc.), so I’ve been keeping both putty and ssh from Terminal.app open whenever I’m working on the VPS. Together, they make for a useable setup.
So, if you’re in my boat, give putty a try. It kind of feels like a Windows 3.1 app and it never seems to save settings, but I can’t complain.
