Monday, May 28, 2018

Question... how do those of you who use Linux replace SecureCRT?

I had the bright idea of wiping my Windows install and going full Linux a few weeks ago, and so far everything is going great except the damn session manager. How do real Linux people do this?

SecureCRT did several very important things for me that I haven't found a replacement for:

  1. It managed my sessions and allowed me to organize them into groups. With 700 sessions there's no way I could manually remember every one of those.

  2. It allowed copy and paste easily moving config between sessions or a text editor.

  3. It saved a CYA log.

  4. It had a "chat" window where it could send commands simultaneously to more than one session.

  5. It saved credentials, saving loads of time not having to retype the password each time I needed to log in.

  6. And it made it super easy to write and run scripts.

So, #6 is easy, I'll just go full on Ansible and not script in the terminal. I haven't found a equivalent solution for #5. I read (but haven't tried yet) that tmux can do #4. The big thing will be finding a way to do the equivalent of right click the folder, boom 15 sessions open, instantly send the same command to all of them at once. SSH can do #3 but again, I just wish it happened automatically and I didn't have to remember to do it every time I connect. I haven't found a solution for #2 yet. And #1 can be solved by recording everything in a text file. Basically, so far, my Linux workflow works but really really sucks.

I know SecureCRT does have a Linux version, but I had trouble installing it on my distro (Arch) and besides, it just doesn't seem right to have an amazing 100% open source desktop, and then the one thing that has to be a proprietary blob is the terminal emulator.

I also tried Remmina, which is kind of the right direction but still has some serious limitations (missing #2, 3, 4 and 6, and no telnet or com ports).



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