Zugg Software :: View topic - [2.29 CMudPro] Display Irregularities in SSH Terminal

Novice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 35 Location: USA

Server: RHEL 4 & 5, Centos 5, SLES 10
Client: WindowsXP Pro, Windows XP64 Pro
Protocol: SSH2
Test Application: joe-3.4-3 <-unusable Crying or Very sad

Test Application: screen <-partially usable
Test Application: mc <-omg Exclamation

Test Application: yum <-odd behavior Confused

The display profile between CMudPro and PuTTY are not consistent.
1) The behavior in CMudPro is best described as random indenting, linespaces, and character redraws when arrowing about.
2) Man pages display differently with stock *rc and account profiles.
3) The prompt from the server seems to occationally develope a ghost duplicate (visually) line at the bottom of the screen when scrolling, returning from split screen, or exiting a curses based application.
4) midnight commander is completely fubar Shocked

Fortunately I could just type exit, but occationally I get this:

Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 5:17 pm

You'll need to keep in mind that I know practically nothing about linux/unix systems. If you have differences between CMUD SSH and PuTTY, then I'll need to see screen shots of both systems explaining the differences. And I'll only be able to test "standard" linux utilities since our linux server has most extraneous stuff stripped from it.

Also, I'm assuming that you are already using Telnet Character Mode option in CMUD? If not, be sure to turn that on and then click on the main output window to enter your text there instead of using the CMUD command line. The CMUD command line operates in Telnet/ssh line mode and always sends a CR/LF after it.

If you are able to connect to the server using a normal Telnet connection (not SSH), I'd be interested in knowing if there are any differences. I need to know if the problems are in the CMUD parsing of the data from the MUD, or if the problem is in the 3rd party SSH components that I am using in CMUD. SSH happens at a very low level that I have little control over, so I'm guessing that these problems occur in normal telnet as well. If that is the case, then I'll need to see some debug output that shows exactly what control codes the server is sending to CMUD. You can turn on the Script Debugger and enable the Raw Input/Output message and post the results within [CODE] tags on the forum for us to see the exact control codes sent from the server.

Finally, also use whatever command you need on the server to find out what kind of terminal-type has been detected. Sometimes can be problems with the terminal type so that CMUD and PuTTY are detected as different types. And this can cause the server to send the data differently. So to compare CMUD and PuTTY, we need to make sure that both are detected as the same terminal type.

Novice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 35 Location: USA

I'll check all those things.

Novice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 35 Location: USA

Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 9:13 pm

OK, I mentioned this in the other post, but I'll mention it again here. There *was* a problem in SSH mode when sending a newline to the server. CMUDPro was sending CRLF instead of just LF when in SSH mode (SSH uses a different newline than telnet, which is a bit of a pain). But I have the Enter key fixed for v2.30.

It's a bit tough to debug stuff on your server because it takes over a minute for a connection to finish.

I see the other problems that you mentioned with joe and mc. I'm not sure what mc is supposed to look like but I'll try it with PuTTY to see it. Looks like it's some xterm emulation issues. CMUD emulates ANSI and VT100 but it appears that xterm is using some additional or different control codes.

I'm not going to be able to fix this in the next 2.30 version, but I'll keep it on my bug list. I will try to capture some debug output from your server before I finish today so that I can do some basic testing offline.

Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 9:27 pm

OK, I captured log files in both CMUD and PuTTY. So in the future I can compare them to figure out what is wrong with the CMUD terminal emulation.

(PuTTY was sure a pain. It's log files go to Windows\System32 directory by default...*what*!?!?...and in Vista, since writing to this directory isn't allowed, Windows was creating a VirtualStore for this file hidden over in the user appdata/local area. Very nasty).

Sorry I'm able to get this fixed quickly. The terminal emulation code in CMUD was taken from zMUD and is very old. So it's hard to make quick changes without a *lot* of debugging for potential side effects.

I certainly want to get the SSH and other terminal emulation improved for people who want to use CMUDPro (or the future TeSSH client) for business purposes. For for MUD users, this isn't effecting enough users right now to make this a critical issue for this particular public version.

Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 9:35 pm

Hmm, here is some more interesting info. I connected to our own zuggsoft.com server via SSH and found out that we have "joe" installed here too. We also have the "mc" command on our server. So I was able to do some local testing.

It all worked fine on the zuggsoft.com server!!

The difference is that for the zuggsoft.com server it is detecting CMUDPro as a vt100 terminal type instead of xterm. So I think that might be the problem. Is there a way for you to play with your terminal type to see if setting it to vt100 fixes the problem?

Novice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 35 Location: USA

Consider me on your list for early adoption and support of TeSSH (wallet is ready). With such a powerful scripting engine under the hood, the possibilities are limited only by imagination. With only the most modest pitch, I think admins will see the virtues and those governing procurement could easy be swayed to purchase.

Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 9:56 pm

Some more information...

I tested to your server again, and when I do

echo $TERM

it actually shows vt100 for me (your preferences might be set to xterm). So what's strange is that the terminal type is the same on your server and on zuggsoft.com, and yet the "joe" and "mc" commands work on zuggsoft.com but not on your server. So I'm not sure what is happening here.

Your server is using OpenSSH_4.3, while our server is OpenSSH_3.8.1p1, so that might be one difference. Or it might be a difference between the linux on your server vs what we have on our server. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I know enough about linux to really understand this. Hopefully the log files will tell me something, but they are large and will take a lot of time to go through (and PuTTY's log files have a lot of extra stuff in them that make them hard to read too).

Novice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 35 Location: USA

Agreed. I get vt100 too on a stock session. I'll reset my non ZuggTest session from xterm to vt100 and retest the results.

I'm now envious to learn that joe and mc work at zuggsoft. I'll pass that little juicy bit onto the team and see if I can't inspire some competiti...er enthusiam.