[GUIDE] SSH over Meshtastic

Builds / Use Cases
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Before attempting to follow this guide, carefully read the disclaimer section right below this line.

Disclaimer
Check your country’s regulations about the duty cycle limitations of the band you are using meshtastic on before you consider following this guide. Chances are you will go way out of the limit as this procedure is meant to work on more “conventional” networks where no such limitations exist. Basic SSH connection over mosh isn’t exactly what’s commonly considered a network-heavy operation, but it requires lots of network packets that could cross what the duty cycle regulations of your region outline.
I’m not responsible for what you are doing or trying to achieve. This guide is for educational purposes only.

Guide

SSH is a piece of software used to securely access remote servers over the regular internet stack. You’re going to use it to connect 2 computers you have with each other.

You can think of mosh as a sort of SSH wrapper that tries really hard to make a SSH connection more resilient to spotty, degraded network links. You could probably get away from using it, at least when you are using a shortfast connection preset. But it’s my go-to for anything SSH even when I’m using a Gigabit fiber connection to a datacenter.

You need 2 linux-powered devices and 2 meshtastic-capable devices. You are going to make them communicate with each other through a remote connection over LoRa powered by the meshtastic network.
Well, you could still self-connect a computer over SSH. That would require you only 1 device. But if you understand this, you probably already know what’s written in this guide and you’re wasting your time here. Also, it wouldn’t really make much sense. It defeats the purpose of SSH except probably for testing if the SSH daemon is correctly listening to connections on the PC you are working on.

  1. install SSH on both the computers you are using for this experiment. One of them needs a SSH server and the other an SSH client. If don’t know how to install/configure that, google it. Some useful links for the most popular distributions:

  1. Let’s call computer A the server and computer B the client. Make sure you configure the ssh daemon accordingly (it’s required to run only on A and check that its ListenAddress is 0.0.0.0, it should be the default configuration on /etc/ssh/sshd_config or equivalent filepath, depending on your linux distribution). Connect your meshtastic nodes to A and B via USB.

  2. Make sure you have the meshtastic python cli and the pytap2 module installed on both A and B. Guide for it here (it’s in the README, scroll down).

  3. Open a terminal window and, as a privileged user, run meshtastic --tunnel on both A and B. Keep this terminal open for as long as you want to use a connection between A and B. This command will do all the network heavy lifting. It will create a software network interface and assing a IP address to each of your computers. By default the IP subnet that meshtastic creates for you is in the 10.155.0.0/16 range. You are not exactly required to know this, but you need to take note of the IPs that meshtastic assign to A and B. In my case it was 10.115.91.76 for A and 10.115.208.212 for B, but as far as I’m aware it could be 2 random IPs in the 10.155.0.0/16 address space.

  4. Once you reached this stage, you just need to get back to the ssh guides and come out with something like ssh USERNAME@10.115.208.76 from a new terminal of computer B in order to connect to A. If you have issues with the permissions, check whether the SSH PasswordAuthentication is allowed or not from the SSH configuration files and/or you copy-pasted the SSH keys correctly if you followed the more secure passwordless authentication route.
    In order to leverage the greater stability offered by mosh make sure mosh is installed on both the computers. The command then becomes mosh USERNAME@10.115.208.76 from computer B. The meshtastic software network and the meshtastic node will take care of the magic required for it to work. It takes a while for the connection to establish in the shortfast preset and a huge time for the longslow preset if you don’t hit some TCP or SSH handshake timeout first. I suggest you to try it out in the shortfast mode as it has much more throughput and less latency overall (at the expense of the range of course, no free lunch here).

If the command of the last point completed successfully, you should see the shell of your remote computer A appearing on the terminal of computer B. From B you can now run shell commands that A takes care of executing, with all the limitations and/or features that this implies.

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Wow, just wow. Such a great guide!

Would you be able to publish this on our website? If not, would you mind if we copy/paste it in there for you?

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Thanks!

Sure, no problem. If copy/pasting works then play along. I wrote this guide in order to share it :grinning:

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Is it possible to configure Meshtastic in a way that it automatically complies with the duty cycle (AFAIK 1% in Europe), even when you try to send more packages? An option for this including settings for the correct duty cycle would be great.
How much will that slow down the connection?

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duty cycle adherence is built into 1.3 firmware.

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Hi, SSH uses TCP. How did you manage to get TCP to work? Not even the three-way handshake works for me.
meshtastic_tcp_iperf3_over_udp.pcapng.uf2|attachment (remote the .uf2 extension) (4.2 KB)

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Probably by changing to a faster modem preset:

The default settings are just way too slow for something like TCP.

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