Remote Connections

Remote connections are easily made by typing the URL in the Location Toolbar; these are actually KIO Slaves. Please note that the Krusader panel does not support all KIO Slave e.g. http:// will not work in the panel, but will work in the viewer. Some examples:

ftp://public.ftpserver.org/directory/
fish://username@hostname/
sftp://username:password@sftp.foo.org/
ftp://username@my.server.org:21/directory/
smb://username:password@server/share
ftp://username@proxyusername:password@proxipassword@hostname/directory
nfs://<host>:<port><url-path>
webdav://www.server.com/path/

You can bookmark these URL's, however, please read the Bookman section regarding securely save passwords. For connecting to multiple locations, bookmark these URL's and open them one by one, or open them all together by using Panel profiles. To switch from one to another location, just open a Folder tabs for each.

There are three ways to start a remote connection:

Type the URL in the Location Toolbar
Select Tools->New Net Connection which will pop-up a dialog that will ask for the remote site details. This dialog is handy if you are not used to type remote URL's in the Location Toolbar. Leaving the password and user name fields empty will log you in as anonymous. NOTE: we are planning to rewrite this dialog window.
You can bookmark a directory on a remote host and return to this directory from the bookmark button on the top corner of your panel just like in a web browser.

After you log on to a remote server you can browse it just like your local hard drive with the following exceptions:

You cannot execute files on remote servers.
Permissions cannot always be calculated on remote servers (depends on server and access method) so you might get a "?" on the permissions columns for some files.
Disk usage information is not available for most remote filesystems.

To change the charset of the remote host use View->Select Remote Charset .

You can close the current Active Remote Connection by two separate methods:

Manually: Add the disconnect button to the Main Toolbar and click on it.
Automatically: Change the URL in the Location Toolbar .

Note

Krusader is a file manager that supports remote connections via KIO Slaves, but if you are looking for even more advanced remote connections features, e.g. an advanced FTP-client we recommend you to use e.g. Kasablanca or Kftpgrabber.

LAN connections via fish:/ protocol (zeroconf)

This section is contributed by Andrew Svet (z-vet), feedback about this chapter is appriciated. Thanks!

Note

This works on a Debian® system, so it will work on Debian® and derivatives (Kubuntu® etc.), though it should work on other Linuxes as well. We assume that you have SSH installed, configured and working on every machine on LAN you want to connect to/from. There are plenty of very good tutorials about SSH on the net, e.g. at linuxhomenetworking.com or just google for it. We use the default SSH port (22) for this chapter. Remember to change it if you use different one. All modifications, editing etc. must be done as root.

Let's start with installing all the packages we need:

# apt-get install avahi-daemon libnss-mdns kdnssd

Everything is installed, now let's do some configuration. First, we need our services to be announced on LAN. That's why we installed avahi-daemon: it represents your machine on local network and allows other applications to publish services they provide. Avahi-daemon comes with example ssh.service configuration file found in /usr/share/doc/avahi-daemon/examples . In order to get the service to be announced on LAN we need to copy this file to /etc/avahi/services directory:

# cp /usr/share/doc/avahi-daemon/examples/ssh.service /etc/avahi/services

Now we need fish:/ protocol to be announced too, so we use an ssh.service file as a template for fish.service:

# cp /etc/avahi/services/ssh.service /etc/avahi/services/fish.service

This file is just a copy of ssh.service, Edit the fish.service file and replace "Remote Terminal on %h" with "Fish to %h" and "_ssh._tcp" with "_fish._tcp". Here's how it looks after edit:

 
<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*--> 
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">

<!-- $Id: remote-connections.docbook,v 1.6 2007/05/02 18:07:28 codeknight Exp $ --> 

<!-- 
  This file is part of avahi. 
  
  avahi is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it 
  under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as 
  published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the 
  License, or (at your option) any later version. 

  avahi is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but 
  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of 
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR 

<!-- See avahi.service(5) for more information about this configuration file --> 

<service-group> 

  <name replace-wildcards="yes">FISH to %h</name> 

  <service> 
    <type>_fish._tcp</type> 
    <port>22</port> 
  </service> 

</service-group>

Save the modified file. Now we need to create a new file _fish._tcp, open a text editor and add the next lines:

Name=FISH Protocol (ssh) 
Type=_fish._tcp 
UserEntry=u 
PathEntry=path 
PasswordEntry=p

And save the file /usr/share/apps/zeroconf/_fish._tcp Do the same on each machine on your LAN, then restart avahi-daemon:

# /etc/init.d/ avahi-daemon restart

Than open Krusader and type in location-toolbar-lnk: zeroconf:/ to open the zeroconf connection. Enter the Fish Protocol directory. Inside you'll find the links to each machine that announced fish:/ on your LAN, the location-toolbar-lnk: will point to zeroconf:/_fish._tcp Double clicking on any of these machines, them will bring up the password prompt, asking you for yor ssh key passphrase (if password was set). Enter your passphrase. Congratulations: you connected to remote machine using Krusader!