Re: channel association

[Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams%sun.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 02:52:52AM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
> More generally, it is a conceptual problem to associate a request with
> a session, but have no way to associate an asynchronous response to
> that request with the relevant session (or the particular request that
> produced it, which would allow identifying the session).

Agreed.  But note that the draft does say "[t]he resulting channels are
independent of the session, ..."

> In passing, I note that TCP connection forwarding was done right in
> this regard: it makes no pretense of being associated with any session,
> and is requested with not a CHANNEL_REQUEST but a GLOBAL_REQUEST.
> 
> Has anyone addressed such issues before?  I can think of at least two
> different ways of addressing them, and while I could simply pick one
> and implement it with private requests, I'd be interested in hearing
> about experiences from anyone who's tackled the issue already.

I think this problem probably ought to be fixed, but if it is to be
fixed it should be fixed in a separate document.

There are several fixes for this that I can imagine:

a) Add a channel request for opening forwarded whatever channels.

b) Add new SSH_MSG_CHANNEL_OPEN channel types for channels associated
with session channels that includes the channel id of the associated
session channel.

c) Add new channel requests for associating an open channel with a
session channel.  Of course, if may be to late at that point for the
client to do anything useful with this info, so this may not be useful
at all.

I much prefer (b).

Nico
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