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Set Up Mosh on macOS

TL;DR: brew install, firewall, pfctl, have a nice day!

June 29, 2017Filed under tech#macos#sysadminMarkdown source

Last night I bumped back into Mosh (by way of this post), and decided to give it a whirl – I had seen it before, and in fact had even installed it, but had never gotten around to giving it a try.

If you’re not familiar with Mosh, it’s like SSH: a remote (terminal) connection to another machine. Unlike SSH, though, a single session can survive disconnects: it sets up a small server on the host machine and will reestablish the connection if it drops. It also responds immediately when you’re typing, even if there’s serious lag to the other server – it just gives you a nice visual signal (underlining) to let you know the other side hasn’t received what you’ve typed. This seems pretty nice, so I thought I’d set it up on my iMac so I could hit it from my iPad.

This isn’t complicated, but it also isn’t well-documented after the first step!

Steps

  1. Install mosh.

    • via the binary on their site
    • by running brew install mosh

  2. Find the install location for the server from your Terminal:

    $ which mosh-server

  3. Configure the firewall to allow the mosh server to install connections.

    1. Open the Security and Privacy pane of the System Preferences app.
    2. Choose the Firewall tab. Unlock it to make changes.
    3. Click Firewall Options.
    4. On the pane that opens, click the + button to add a new rule.
    5. Navigate to the location you got in step 2 above. (One easy way to do this: hit ⌘ Cmd⇧ ShiftG, and paste in the output from the which command.) Click Add.
    6. Find “mosh-server” in the list, and set it to Allow incoming connections.
    7. Hit OK.

  4. Persuade macOS to reload its firewall rules. (This may not be necessary, but it was for me.) You can do one of the following:

    • restart your machine

    • reload the normal rules manually:

      $ sudo pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf

  5. You may also need to open these ports on your router firewall. You should consider carefully whether you want a bunch of open ports sitting there or whether you want to just use a specific port and then always target that specific port by running mosh with the -p option:

    $ mosh -p 60000 [email protected]

    If you can connect locally but not remotely, this is probably what you need!

That should be all you need!