A lot of people use SSH for DMZs, and thus you have to ssh through several hosts (4 hops through one environment I'm familiar with!) It would be nifty to see syntax something like: ssh user1@hop1/hop2/hop3/user4@hop4 reboot This would ssh to hop1 as user1, then to hop2 as user1, then to hop3 as user1 and then hop4 as user4 and execute the reboot command. The '/' could be replaced with another character, doesn't matter, so long as there is some way to represent this. The same syntax should work for scp and sftp as well. As part of this it'd really be helpful to have port forwarding integrated, so I could do: ssh user1@hop1/hop2/hop3/user4@hop4 -L 500 -R 5000 sleep 3600 Which would do the same as above except execute the sleep 3600 command, and forward the local port 500 (on the host you are on) to remote port 5000 on hop4. This would fix a major hassle because right now doing something like that requires naming ports in the intermediate hops, and there isn't any way to say "pick a random port, I don't care, I just want to connect both ends". As a result everyone port forwarding through like this needs to use a different port number, and they have to wait for the ports to time out if they need to reconnect.
You can already do this with a ProxyCommand and a little help from the intermediate hosts. Suppose you have two sets of firewalls with hostA at one end, hostB in the middle and hostC at the other end. You can do something like the following in ~/.ssh/config on hostA: Host hostB User user1 Host hostC ProxyCommand ssh hostB nc hostC 22 User user2 You can keep stacking these (although obviously get slower): Host hostD ProxyCommand ssh hostC nc hostD 22 User user3
Darren's workaround is a good way to do this.
Change all RESOLVED bug to CLOSED with the exception of the ones fixed post-4.4.