paramiko vs plink

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Gordon Tyler wrote:
> Is it better to use paramiko or plink as the bazaar ssh client on
> Windows, performance-wise?
> 
> Ciao,
> Gordon
> 
> 

Performance should be approximately the same. Paramiko uses PyCrypto for
the hard work, which is all compiled code. Both allow you to use pageant
to manage your keys.

The main difference is that paramiko integrates slightly better. plink
doesn't know how to grab the console, so it will often fail when

1) Connecting to a host for the first time, because it wants to prompt
you that the host key is valid.

2) Password access is needed. Because you have to type in your password,
and plink doesn't know how to get direct access to the terminal. And
stdin/stderr/stdout are all messed up because it is being run as a
subprocess to bzr.

I personally use paramiko. For some hosts I use cygwin's ssh. But that
is only for ones that require complex setup. (For some of our servers in
the data center you have to ssh to one machine, open up a port to the
machine you really want, and then ssh to that machine. This can be done
with OpenSSH's ProxyCommand stuff.)

We no longer auto-detect plink because of the problems with 1 and 2, but
you can manually set BZR_SSH=plink in case you already have some sort of
complex setup.

John
=:->
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