I am attempting to edit a remote file in Emacs, and I’m having trouble getting from the documentation and previous SO questions to doing the thing I want.
I’m working remotely, from a variety of locations, and I want to edit files on server Foo. Server Foo isn’t directly reachable from the Internet, but server Bar is, and Foo accepts connections from Bar. I can count on reaching Bar, and Bar can count on reaching Foo.
The Tramp documentation tells me that I need to add to Tramp’s proxy list to do this, and that it should look like the following:
(add-to-list 'tramp-default-proxies-alist
("foo_host" "seanm" "/ssh:seanm@bar_host"))
However, when I try that, it doesn’t work, and I get inscrutable error messages.
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How can I unambiguously refer to Foo? There is no DNS server that knows how to find Foo from its hostname, and Foo’s IP address is in the 10.0.0.0/8 private space. I don’t want to refer to Foo by that IP address, because that risks colliding with hosts in other 10.0.0.0/8 networks I may visit. As a kludge, I added Foo to Bar’s /etc/hosts file, but that didn’t seem to work. Is there a better solution?
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What quoting rules do I need to adhere to? The examples that I’m seeing use both “double quotes” and `tick-and-single’ quotes, the latter apparently requiring double-backslash escaping. I don’t understand what’s going on there – it seems like there are multiple layers of parsing that this string is going to be shoved through.
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While trying variations on this, I’ve gotten error messages that amount to “you can’t use that remote-access method for that scenario.” How can I set up a second proxy method that will let me do the equivalent of C-x C-f
/su::/path/to/file?
It all seems very painful compared to the previous multi-hop syntax.
Later: I was able to get the many layers of escaping right so that emacs correctly ‘hears’ the names of hosts. However, I can’t get any hops beyond a second to work correctly, which is a very disappointing lapse in functionality.
The correct answer turned out to be modifying my SSH config with Host, HostAlias, and ProxyCommand directives.