Re: [Fab-user] Connecting to a remote host through an ssh gateway

[Jeff Forcier]

Hi David,

First off, Christian is correct that we don't currently handle this
sort of thing in Fabric. I'm not positive that it *cannot* be done,
but basically we're at the mercy of the SSH library we use (currently
Paramiko, though this might change in the near future) so if it
doesn't offer the tools necessary, we're generally out of luck.

> Sadly, it seems that Paramiko does not honor
> OpenSSH's configuration file, and so the connection fails.

Paramiko is apparently capable of reading config files, though it's
unclear as to just how much it actually honors or interprets. When
Googling, I found
http://www.lag.net/pipermail/paramiko/2008-October.txt, and most of
the discussion in that month is about ProxyCommand and similar issues.
Sounds like it is definitely not well supported at this time.

I also just poked around the other lib I'm looking at, Twisted Conch,
and it also doesn't seem to have baked in ProxyCommand support.

End result, in my opinion, is that it would be nice to support this,
but it doesn't look easy at this point in time. We may be able to
implement it ourselves eventually, or wait for another lib to do it
for us, but for now I think you probably are best off setting up a
tunnel.

Best,
Jeff