Advanced usage cases

Debug git and rsync

Sometimes it’s interesting to debug git or rsync. Starting with version 5.4, SSH-MITM is able to intercept ssh commands like git or rsync.

Performing a git pull or rsync with a remote server only executes a remote ssh command and the file transfer is part of the communication.

There is also a new plugin debug_traffic to debug the traffic of ssh commands.

$ ssh-mitm server --scp-interface debug_traffic

Note

SCP file transfers are executed as ssh command. This is the reason why the debug_traffic plugin is implemented as a scp-interface plugin.

In most cased, when git is used over ssh, publickey authentication is used. The default git command does not have a forward agent parameter.

To enable agent forwarding, git has to be executed with the GIT_SSH_COMMAND environment variable.

# start the ssh server
$ ssh-mitm server --remote-host github.com --scp-interface debug_traffic

# invoke git commands
$ GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -A" git clone ssh://git@127.0.0.1:10022/ssh-mitm/ssh-mitm.git

When SSH-MITM is used to intercept rsync, the port must be provided as a parameter to rsync. Also the agent can be forwarded, if needed.

To sync a local directory with a remote directory, rsync can be executed with following parameters.

$ rsync -r -e 'ssh -p 10022 -A' /local/folder/ user@127.0.0.1:/remote/folder/