I meant to switch from a user to another one while beeing on the host, e.g :

ssh toto@middlehost && su – admin && ssh root@lasthost

Belier allow to make such a connection.

Another disavantage I see with chaining ssh connections is you’re going to be asked for passwords, or you’ll have to exchange ssh keys on every host you’ll cross. That’s precisely why Belier manages these both situations, adapting to the existing hosts without requiring any modifications, never prompting you for info. The connection is fully automated whatever the hosts configurations are.

I read this post a while ago, and I think the complexity of the process confirms Belier is worth a try for people having such a need. The syntax Belier uses for its configuration file is far clearer and minimalist.

Moreover you’re basically just chaining ssh connections. Belier offers interesting features you can’t have with your ssh config, as switching from an account to another on the same host or using a tunnel data, allowing you to copy files from the source host to the final host directly.

You can have a look at the Keyring webpage to have a full list of Keyring possibilities (e.g the OSXKeychain backend, Win32CryptoKeyring). Backends for Gnome-keyring and KWallet are not the only features the Keyring library offer.

One of the major features of this API is you can create your own keyring or write your own keyring backends, meaning you just have to develop a backend to integrate any keyring you want in this API.

It doesn’t seem pointless to me, especially if this library merges with an official Python module like getpass in the future, offering the developers in the standard library a unified way to access/create any keyring.

Which makes this effort a bit pointless…