MobaXterm free Xserver and tabbed SSH client for Windows | Hacker News Reader

MobaXterm free Xserver and tabbed SSH client for Windows

mobaxterm.mobatek.net

56 pointsmirceasoaica19 comments

I've been using this for about 2 years at work, and am pretty happy to have a program that provides ssh access and an X Windows servers "out of the box." It's nice that I can recommend this to my colleagues and then not have them come back to me with a lot of questions about how to get it working.

For me, MobaXTerm is a well-working substitute for PuTTy + MinGW.

The GUI does a few things differently from how I'd prefer. I think the SFTP client doesn't work with the style of password authentication I work with, and I wasn't able to get the "master control port" functionality working successfully. But mostly, it Just Works, and that's a good thing to be able to say of a piece of software.

I don't use the GUI to run Unix-y programs, though. I've installed some assortment of MinGW-based Unix utilities that will mostly run from my command line or (preferrably, for me) from ConEmu. For when I really need industrial-strength CygWin, I use the command line built into Git - or maybe CygWin itself.

MobaXterm is nice, but be aware that it doesn't play well with Unix tools other than the old versions that it comes bundled with. I use vagrant for all development now, so I thought that meant I could use Windows. I tried setting up an environment that used MobaXterm, a newer version of git, rsync, vagrant, VirtualBox and Emacs. That wasn't much to ask, I thought -- every other Unix tool I needed could run inside the vagrant boxes. However, I just couldn't get everything to work together after days of fiddling. One symptom of the problem: almost all of the above tools come with their own copy of SSH.

My recommendation: install mingw-get [1], and then install everything from there.

[1] http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started

It looks nice. I suggest that all http requests to redirect to https (also enabling HSTS and preload it into browsers HSTS list), it makes admins easier to suggest the software for their users. On the other hand I wouldn't suggest a closed source software for ssh for my users, but that's just me. However it's hard to suggest putty for Windows users either since it's virtually impossible to download it securely [1]. I think the most secure suggestion is cygwin+openssh also it's the most inconvenient.

[1] https://noncombatant.org/2014/03/03/downloading-software-saf...

It's based on GNU GPL software and MobaXTerm is under GPL v3. I found the license link on the bottom (http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/license.html) and the source files (http://download.mobatek.net/sources/?C=M;O=D). "To compile the program, you will need Borland Delphi 7 Professional Edition with the Jedi VCL library, AlphaControls components, SecureBlackbox components and Overbyte ICS components." (from the readme in mobaxterm-7.7-src.tar.bz2)

Oh, sorry then. It seems to be a plus for a security critical software that it's open source though, it could be advertised more. Although compiling the pro version for free could be simple, it requires more expensive software to do so.

This is bad advice. The linked document seems to be interspersed with misconceptions. It is important to remember that downloading your software over an encrypted link does nothing to ensure the integrity of the software.

Please note that the complete infrastructure of all the big Linux distributions (Red Hat, Debian, etc.) is all served over plaintext only. This is for a very good reason, and you must understand these reasons before making suggestions on software distribution schemes.

Software should be verified using PGP signatures. These signatures should be distributed with the software. Keys are published on keyservers and signed through the web of trust (easiest done by attending any open source conference). There must be no trust placed in distribution archives and mirrors.

If software integrity was entrusted to the transport layer, any employee of sourceforge, github or any one of the hundreds of mirrors out there could backdoor anything. There is also strength in numbers with the distribution method. If every little package had their own way to check integrity, it would be easy to fool the casual user to use a less secure method by controlling the distribution point.

I've been using it for a year or so as my main terminal app (putty replacement), renewed for 2nd year and will keep using it. While it is a great kitchen sink for anyone on Windows overall UI experience is not so great. Windows UI guidelines are not followed - dialog boxes look like they are from another planet. Occasional weirdness occur with SFTP browser not starting when connecting (app restart required) and other little things like that. Support is decent. Loving MOSH support.

I loved this app but I couldn't find anything as fully featured for mac, does anyone know of anything similar for OSX?

What's wrong with the built-in terminal?

(Or if you want some kind of kitchen sink app, perhaps iTerm2 is what you're after.)

Maybe http://www.royalapplications.com/ts/osx/features

Thanks, this looks great! It doesn't appear to have SCP or FTP as connection types though.

The developer is extremely responsive, you could probably reach out and ask. Typically for scp or ftp I just use a terminal session anyways. You can setup custom connection strings, so you could have a terminal session launch and connect with scp/ftp.

The whole point of using OS X is not needing this kind of stuff.

I don't need it but I preferred the workflow of mobaxterm instead of a purely command line workflow.

XQuartz might be of interest to you. It used to be included with OS X in older releases but is an external download now. http://xquartz.macosforge.org/

After you've installed it, you can test that it works by typing

    xeyes

in your terminal. That should show two googly eyes.

Then ssh to some other machine with X forwarding enabled. To do that, ensure the remote host has

    X11Forwarding yes

    /etc/ssh/sshd_config

then

    ssh -X example.com

Assuming the server has the necessary X11 libraries and xeyes is installed on the server, you can once again type

    xeyes

and you'll see the googly eyes again but what you are actually seeing is them running from the remote machine.

Hope this helps though I'm not sure it is quite what you're looking for.

(Personally, I use X forwarding very rarely, prefering the terminal for almost everything but browsing the web.)

Where is it storing the keys? The amount of clients I have tested that store keys in plaintext locally on the hard drive. It is mostly trivial to hoover these up if you are so inclined. Most malware checks for the default paths to keys on your system. Of course, if the value you enter is checked against a hash we are fine, but most people do not take that step of entering the pass each time. In other words, if I can fire up the application and suddenly I'm in an SSH session, so can anybody else. A common technique I have seen in some clients is using the machine GUID as a salt to login, but even that can be hoovered up by malware and replayed on another system.

Free as a best examples of modern day demo crippleware

>Max. 12 sessions >Max. 2 SSH tunnels >Max. 4 macros >Max. 360 seconds for Tftp, Nfs and Cron

Looks great, ive been using Putty Connection Manager since forever when stuck on Windows but its not being maintained for years.

Have not used putty or WinSCP in the couple years since I've installed MobaXTerm. Nice package.

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