Hello,

I have probably a little odd question, but hope I've chosen the most appropriate forum and I would get some advice here.

I have an access to a remote machine which runs FreeBSD. I connect there via ssh and run there some program (instant messenger). IM can run and execute any python script except script opening a new socket.

And here is my problem. I want to run some script on my local machine (e.g. play a sound) when some event occur on the remote machine (new message arrival). And the only connection which I have is the ssh connection (cant open new socket on remote machine and my local one is behind NAT). Is there any way to handle such event?

Alternatively I was looking how to stream audio over ssh what would also solve my problem but I don't think it's a best and most effective solution (while I could get the same result by sending only a few bytes instead of many kilobytes).

Thanks in advance,
David

Try getting your IM client to run a simple Python script that just logs a message to standard out. Hopefully, that message should get sent to the standard output of the IM client, which in turn will be passed over SSH - then it's just a matter of parsing the SSH client's standard output client-side.

If the IM client redirects the script's output, then you may have to do something else to pass the message along. You can create a named pipe on the BSD machine, then when you connect, run the IM client in the background (add an "&" to the end of the command-line). Then cat the named pipe in the ssh session. You can then have your python script write a line of text to the named pipe when the message arrives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_p..._pipes_in_Unix

The client-side processing should be fairly easy. Once you have the message-sending working, you can just pipe the output of ssh into a python script (add "|/path/to/script" to the command-line), and then use that to play your sound when a message arrives.

Hope that helps,

–Robert J Lee

If you are running same script on your local machine, maybe you can send a message from remote IM to local IM, bypassing ssh session all together?

Also, if I rememmber correctly, SSH can redirect/forward desired ports so you can have something like mini network inside SSH tunnel. If I do rememmber correctly, then maybe you could create server-client connection between local and remote host (maybe even direct IM?)

Are you able to tunnel X via ssh? At least then you could open multiple terminals. Can you ssh back to your own machine.
Kevin Barry

Thank you a lot for all answers. I think port forwarding is exactly what I was looking for. Now I just need to write a program listening on a given port on my local machine and use remote forwarding by typing 'ssh -R{remote_port}:localhost:{local_port} {remote_address}'

If someone has similar problem, here I found a great tutorial on that: http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/networ...sh/ch09_02.htm