There are actually quite a few aspects of your blog that I think we will emulate in the near future, with a twist, to solve more similar problems. This problem set was super different though.

Adding a public facing SSH interface to our production hosts was a bit of a non-starter and we would have had to hack together auth on top of that (not just for us, but for our customers too). That's a lot of additional surface area and operational burden we didn't want.

BTW we should catch up over a beer sometime =]