[libvirt PATCH 9/9] rpc: use new virt-nc binary for remote tunnelling

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 07:21:47PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> On Thu, 2020-07-09 at 19:36 +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > This wires up support for using the new virt-nc binary with the ssh,
> > libssh and libssh2 protocols.
> > 
> > The new binary will be used preferentially if it is available in $PATH,
> > otherwise we fall back to traditional netcat.
> > 
> > The "proxy" URI parameter can be used to force use of netcat e.g.
> > 
> >   qemu+ssh://host/system?proxy=netcat
> > 
> > or the disable fallback e.g.
> > 
> >   qemu+ssh://host/system?proxy=virt-nc
> > 
> > With use of virt-nc, we can now support remote session URIs
> > 
> >   qemu+ssh://host/session
> > 
> > and this will only use virt-nc, with no fallback. This also lets the
> > libvirtd process be auto-started.
> 
> Just a couple of comments about the UI: would it make sense to use
> something like
> 
>   qemu+ssh://host/system?tunnelcmd=virt-tunnel
> 
> instead? virt-nc could be seen as a bit of a misnomer, considering
> that (by design) it doesn't do nearly as much as the actual netcat
> does; as for the 'proxy' argument, I'm afraid it might lead people
> to believe it's used for HTTP proxying or some other form of
> proxying *between the client and the host*, whereas it's really
> something that only affects operations on the host itself - not to
> mention that we also have a virtproxyd now, further increasing the
> potential for confusion...

I chose proxy not tunnel, because SSH is providing the tunnel here.
virt-nc is a proxy linking the tunnel to the daemon. virtproxyd is
conceptually similar, again linking a libvirt client to the real
daemon.

I probably shouldn't mention "virt-nc" by name in the URI and instead
have "proxy=netcat" vs "proxy=native", as users don't get to choose
the actual binary here - they are providing an enum string, which
gets mapped to the desired binary.


Regards,
Daniel
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