FISH

FISH is discontinued! It is still supported, but no features will be added to it. A replacement called BAMSE is currently drafted, to be worked on starting at the end of january 2002. Please take a closer look at BAMSE and make it the best SSH client for OpenVMS.

Current version: 0.6-1

FISH is a SSH client for VMS. It features the essential demands of draft-ylonen-ssh-protocol-00.txt. It was thought for a short while that the session key between the server and the client was sent over the network in the clear. Further investigation proved that thought wrong, however.

Authors: Christer Weinigel and Richard Levitte.
Christer did the main work in the beginning, Richard did bug removal and added more ciphers and more.
FISH was essentially a port of Top Gun ssh 1.2, but has evolved quite a lot from it. There will pretty soon be no much similarity left.

Special thanks go to:

David Potterveld and Wolfgang J. Moeller for helping out with efficiency issues.
Jérôme Lauret for a lot of help dealing with the command interface and GNU C issues.
Martin Hamilton for his link on the "psst..." page :-).
Victoriano Giralt for doing whatever was needed to give me access to his http proxy so I could test the proxy feature.

Supported features:

A user interface that ressembles rsh a lot.
Ciphers: Idea, 3DES, DES, RC4, Blowfish.
Authentication: rhosts, RSA, password. TIS authentication is also implemented, but not at all tested.
Host key verification through the KNOWN_HOSTS.DAT file.
Identity file creation and update with full control on amount of RSA bits, cipher used to encrypt the private part and so on.
Choice of identity file to use.
Packet compression (using zlib)
Input and output from and to files. Binary as well as text mode.
Forced pty allocation.
Possibility to communicate through a HTTP proxy (using the HTTP command CONNECT).
RSA key management, host verification and packet compression.

TODO:

New I/O model
Port forwarding
X connection forwarding

Announcements go to the following mailing lists and newsgroups:

VMS-SSH@alpha.sggw.waw.pl
comp.os.vms (INFO-VAX@mvb.saic.com)

Where to find the latest version

You can find the latest version on http://dist.lp.se/historical/VMS/. The version info in the files may be confusing, here how it works:

For a version xx.y, the file name will be FISHxxy.ZIP

For a version xx.y-z, the file name will be FISHUzxxyy.ZIP

So, for example, FISH 0.4-5 was FISHU5004.ZIP, FISH 0.6 is FISH006.ZIP

You may also find source-only kits. They have _SRC appended to the mame. For example, the source kit for FISH 0,6 if FISH006_SRC.ZIP.

This page was made by Richard Levitte <levitte@lp.se>, Levitte Programming

Last modified: Fri Dec 29 01:44:01 CET 2006