How to use Cluster SSH (cssh) and Mosh together

A colleague told me about mosh today, just saying “it’s an alternative to SSH that addresses many of the problems” doesn’t do it credit. Go look at the page and have a look, don’t worry it’s a nice page and I’ll still be here waiting when you come back. I do a lot of work on servers across the globe, and believe me, although subtle, the difference between a 10ms connection and a 100+ ms connection is definitely noticeable 😉 That lag all but disappears with mosh. Mosh doesn’t support X11/SSH-Agent forwarding yet, but it’s on their roadmap.

Back to topic, I also use cssh for working on multiple servers simultaneously. I’d recommend making a copy of your .cshrc file (cp -a ~/.csshrc ~/.csshrc_mosh) and working on the copy. Edit the  ~/.csshrc_mosh and change the lines ssh= and ssh_args= (diff of my files):

You will have to remove any parameters in ssh_args= and move them to your ~/.ssh/config due to the difference in command line parameters between mosh and ssh. Now all you have to do is call cssh with the new config file, e.g. with an alias to make things easier alias mcssh=”cssh -C ${HOME}/.csshrc_mosh” And your done.