how to make chained ssh work with git

Question

I am trying to get round a silly firewall issue. I am trying to chain ssh access to git through a proxy ssh:

~/git-chain:

#!/bin/bash
ssh hosticangetto ssh $*
# End

And then:

$ export GIT_SSH=~/git-chain
$ git clone ssh://git@somerepostore.com/somerepo.git

E, [2012-02-07T12:50:21.434913 #28359] ERROR -- : git command not recognized
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

the arguments being passed into my script are:

git@somerepostore.com git-upload-pack 'somerepo.git'

I've checked the keys from the hosticangetto to the git repository store and everything is ok.

I am not sure why this fails. I've done this sort of thing with mercurial before with mercurial -e switch.

Answer 1

Add these lines to your ~/.ssh/config (or create that file with these lines if it doesn't already exist):

Host somerepostore.com
    ProxyCommand ssh -W %h:%p hosticangetto

Then unset GIT_SSH.

This tells ssh to ssh using hosticangetto as a proxy. This is better than your solution because in your solution, the packets are decrypted on hosticangetto and then re-encrypted for somerepostore.com on the remote host. Using a proxycommand like this means that packets are encrypted for somerepostore.com on your local machine and these encrypted packets are passed through hosticangetto.

Answer 2

I think you need to do something with the TTY.

This didn't work:

ssh server1 ssh server2

It just hangs there.

This seems to have worked:

ssh -t server1 ssh server2

Looking at the verbose output with ssh -v server1 ssh server2 it looks like the first/outside ssh completes and I get to server1, but I do not execute the inside/second ssh for server2.