[diamondsw]

I've noticed several problems relating to SSH on Panther. First, attempting to tunnel ports to localhost no longer works. For example, connecting from my Windows box at work I could tunnel port 5900 to localhost:5900, or the VNC server running on my OS X iBook. Under 10.2, this worked fine. However, with Panther it does not connect. If I tunnel port 5900 to 127.0.0.1:5900, then it works. So, for some reason "localhost" is not being resolved properly as 127.0.0.1. Could this be related to the output of "hostname"? Under Jaguar, "hostname" yielded "localhost". Under Panther it yields "ModernArt.local", which is my computer name and ".local", which I assume is the Rendezvous DNS entry. It should be noted that other things can resolve localhost properly, e.g. "ping localhost" works as expected.

Another strange problem is SCP no longer works. It connects fine but then fails on directory listings, complaining about an unknown listing format. As far as I know, it's simply executing an "ls -al" using bash - any idea if something changed between Jaguar and Panther here?

Finally, VNC tunneling through SSH is troublesome. Every so often it will quit updating the screen - I have to manually request a refresh. Never had to under Jaguar with the same VNC server.

Anyway, in the meantime I've set up my tunnels with 127.0.0.1, started using SFTP instead of SCP, and jumpstarted VNC when necessary. However, I'd really like to know what's going wrong under the surface. Anyone out there know this stuff well enough to take a guess?

[riverfreak]

Actually, hostname on my machine reports the hostname (poudre.local.). Perhaps "localhost" in some contexts is more of a place holder for machines which haven't had their hostname set. In other circumstances, like the ping example you point out, localhost does truly refer to loopback.

BTW, setting of hostname occurs automatically whenever the network is reinitialized, yes?

I can't give you any insight into vnc and scp yet, but will try tomorrow once I have panther installed. Which way are you VNCing? To what type of system?

[diamondsw]

Originally posted by riverfreak:
Actually, hostname on my machine reports the hostname (poudre.local.). Perhaps "localhost" in some contexts is more of a place holder for machines which haven't had their hostname set. In other circumstances, like the ping example you point out, localhost does truly refer to loopback.

BTW, setting of hostname occurs automatically whenever the network is reinitialized, yes?

I can't give you any insight into vnc and scp yet, but will try tomorrow once I have panther installed. Which way are you VNCing? To what type of system?

Still not sure why "localhost" won't resolve, but it's not like using 127.0.0.1 will ever break, so no problem.

As for SCP problem, it appears that "ls -al" under Panther formats the date differently and that is breaking my client:

10.2:
drwxr-xr-x 26 jochs staff 884 Oct 25 21:37 .
drwxrwxr-t 6 root wheel 204 Jun 15 23:26 ..

10.3:
drwxr-xr-x 16 jochs jochs 544 6 Oct 12:33 .
drwxrwxr-t 5 root admin 170 5 Oct 21:54 ..

For VNC, I'm connecting from my Windows XP laptop at work to my iBook at home, using Redstone's OS X VNC server. Thanks to dynamic DNS, SSH, and OSXVNC, I have secure, free, and flexible remote control over my computer from anywhere - very convenient.