this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Hi, Im not sure if this is the right platform to ask on. Long story short, Im stuck at this GIS job, massive computing experience under my belt, but close to 20% experience in GIS. Im playing around with SmallWorld locally and on a cloned repo. But they also have a Development environment on a remote server. Everyone here says theres no way to use your own Emacs version (28) on this one, except Emacs 23. Do you have any comment on this? Talk to me like Im a child. Im not sure if its an SSH setup. A senior told me it isnt (in a very thick accent). He might be bullshitting. (They use a VPN and sometthing called "f5 networks endpoint inspector")

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

In a similar situation on Unix, I’ve installed my own copy of emacs in my home directory on the affected machine. No idea whether that’s feasible on Windows.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

More info is needed, really.

Yes you coudl ssh there and use the local Emacs (v23 apparently.)

If ssh is supported like that, then local to you Emacs (v 29 or whatever) over Tramp/ssh should work fine as well (the F5 load balancer deep packet inspection wouldn't see the different; Tramp is just ssh'ing and running commands same as a user would.)

You could also try sshfs (map a local filesystem to a remote mount over ssh) but in my experience thats really slow.

You could run an Emacs on the remote, with X11 projection to your laptop, over ssh tunnel, but that'd likely be slow, and Emacs 23 is ancient :)

.. so a local to you Emacs 29 with Tramp over ssh to the remote should likely work, but it depends on some other things; they _could_ block it, but not likely, assuming you can ssh there yourself.

Now, if theres a jumpserver or something, that could be a problem (2FA type challenges in the middle) but multi-hop ssh tramp could do it..

Another question is .. why the heck are they stuck at Emacs 23, which is probably 10+ years old. Thats a security risk right there they should be happy to remedy :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

One minimal option is to run emacs locally and simply mount the remote files with sshfs - then at least for editing you can use the latest and greatest emacs. Loading and saving can often be a bit slower than local obviously. This also breaks compile integration — although even there an ssh wrapper around a make (or whatever) call would probably work - I just haven’t tried it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It might be that they use VPN to access SSH. You can try to telnet to the server port 22 and see if you get to the prompt which indicates port is open. If telnet hangs for a minute and then complains about timeout on connection attempt then you probably need to find who's responsible for VPN and try to get one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting! I have so many questions :D Why only Emacs 23? Is that the version that is installed on the server? Emacs 23 dates back to 2009 and if they say it's the only available version I suspect that the system is outdated long time ago. Could mean that security flaws are present, and those might be your ticket to having it upgraded along with Emacs ;)

I'm not sure about the connection, but in case you don't know, Emacs has tramp. Simplified it downloads files from a remote server over ssh so you can edit them with your own config, and then uploads them once you save.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's all probably against the policy but if there is a free port open, you can start ssh. If not, I agree there is no way to use local emacs. I would just try to compile emacs on the remote machine which is difficult restrict if the direct or indirect internet access is allowed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any documents you can guide on setting that up? I'm clueless on SSH. I may have exaggarated on my computing knowledge

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If you find an available open port(it's something you don't have control unless you have an access to network devices between), it's the matter of starting ssh servers like openssh, dropbear on the system.