While kdessh has been part of the KDE Software Collection since many releases, in the port to the KDE 4 Platform it has been broken and stayed so until now (if connecting to systems with only the KDE 4 platform). But obviously nobody has used it, because noone has ever reported this. Or have you just been lazy? 🙂
As kdessh hasn’t had a dedicated maintainer for many years and just gets the random maintainance usual to code in KDE’s software repository, it is now close to being kicked out of the module kdeutils to tags/unmaintained/4, before the final SC 4.4 release. Perhaps it can be fixed in time but it needs someone interested in it to do so.
So if you have been using it and would be missing it: get in contact!
Update: For this just bypassing this blog and have no clue what kdessh is for, here a short description from kdessh’s original author when asked about it some time ago:
kdessh is the remote equivalent of kdesu. It allows you to run a KDE
application on a remote host, potentially under a different UID,
without hassle. It takes care of things like setting up X cookies, ICE
cookies, DCOP (is that still used?) and $DISPLAY.I am not sure how much this is used. It has limited use for a single
desktop use case but could be useful in bigger organisations where
you’d like to run applications remotely.
So these days with ssh doing X11forwarding and with ssh-agents/-add the purpose of kdessh can be questioned. But a proper integration with the KDE platform (e.g. KWallet) is still to be done.
Attracted by virtual constructs 
So what does it do?
I have been lazy, but also asking people about how to use kdessh. I have always just been told ‘it works’, even though I have never been able to get it to do anything.
I won’t miss it.
What is the purpose of kdessh? It looks like a shell command that does store the passwords for a while? Isn’t there ssh-agent or something like this that does do this job (that I do not use, too)?
It does seem rather niche at this point. X11 forwarding for ssh is trivial, and using ssh-agent with ksshaskpass gives you kwallet and agent session integration. Perhaps work can be done to bring ksshaskpass into the KDE SC.
ksshaskpass has the disadvantage you will not be able to see what command is going to be executed on the remote host.
Still ksshaskpass might be a nice addition to the KDE Platform. And that work you mention would for example be to contact the author of ksshaskpass and motivate him to approach the KDE Platform devs 😉
Be different, do it 🙂
Yeah, I am approaching it, but time is rare 😉
Let us hope for some spare time during christmas 🙂
I did not know it existed.
The ssh functionality I miss, and may be taken as a suggestion to kdesh, is synchronous/assynchronous ssh to a number of clients.
Using a script with dcop on konsole to create tabs and initiate ssh sessions, I could ssh and run commands from 2 to 20 workstations. cssh clutters the desktop with open windows all over.
When I wanted synchronous edits on all clients, I would use the ‘send input to all tabs’ facility on the konsole. It was good enough to edit files and install packages.
It was pretty useful. This is the script I was running:
#!/bin/bash
user=$1
shift
konsole –script &
KONSOLE=konsole-$!
echo $KONSOLE
until dcop $KONSOLE ; do sleep 1 ; done
for host in $* ; do
session=$(dcop $KONSOLE konsole newSession)
until dcop $KONSOLE $session ; do sleep 0.5 ; done
dcop $KONSOLE $session renameSession “$host”
dcop $KONSOLE $session sendSession “ssh $user@$host”
sleep 0.5
done
dcop $KONSOLE session-1 closeSession
I didn’t know it existed either. But I would have a use for it because I currently have an issue with setting up variables when sshing between two kde4 boxes. But not when the box I’m using is using kde3.5. It would take me nearly a year to get time to actually look into making it work though (lack of time and experience). Maybe if no one has stepped up by then I’ll do it.
[…] not really do more than ssh with X11-forwarding, is not integrated with KWallet and ssh-agent, and seems not to be missed kdessh has been moved to tags/unmaintained/4, and will no longer be part of kdeutils resp. the KDE […]