marc paradise

A critical bug was found in 1.1.6. If you are encountering a problem wherein a short time after you have connected successfully, you receive this message: “Notice: Index >= 30″ followed by a disconnect, the 1.1.60 update will correct this problem.

OTA installation is available here:

http://marcparadise.com/files/1.1.60/BBSSH.jad

ALX and COD for Desktop Manager/USB installations can be found here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/bbssh/files/

After much delay, and postponement of the planned crypto conversion, the 1.1.6 alpha download is now available. It’s a bit lighter  in features than I planned, mostly because I lost so much time trying to complete the BB crypto conversion.

Before I forget — I wanted to thank everyone who’s taken the time to provide feedback, report issues, enter issues in the SF tracker, and went to the extra lengths needed in order to provide the details I request to resolve those issues.   You make my life much easier, and I appreciate it 

On to the good stuff — OTA installation is available here:

http://marcparadise.com/files/1.1.60/BBSSH.jad

ALX and COD for Desktop Manager/USB installations can be found here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/bbssh/files/

Content

• Bug Fixes
• Features

A bit of detail worth emphasizing here:

• SSHv1 will no longer work as a connection option.  However the option is still present — this way if you have existing SSHv1 connection, you can change it to V2 without having to redefine your session.   I have to double-check, but I think if you don’t change to V2, it will *still* connect as V2 as of this release.
• Changed default font for new sessions to the largest 8×13 font.  I found many people were using the default font named “default”, which is downright painful to look at.
• A new auto-update feature has been added that checks for updates at launch of BBSSH.  No information is gathered at this time ( though in the future I would like to automatically gather BB model and OS versions ).  You can disable this in the Settings screen; if you disable it (which I strongly recommend against), you can manually check for updates on the Settings screen at any time.
• The crypto conversion battle continues – I have been able to replace several crypto components with native blackberry alternatives, but there’s still a good distance to go… I am going to take some time off of that though, so as to catch up with other more immediate needs.
• The “SYM” key is by default bound to toggle CTRL on and off.  SHift+SYM toggles ALT.  However, Storm users can’t use this because SYM is a softkey.  Effective with this release, Storm users should now see menu options in the terminal for toggling ALT/CTRL.   This will only be available for Storm users, and will be removed once key binding customization is fully functional (hopefully next release).

WAP2 special note

WAP2 support was added in this release and is now available in the connection properties screen as a connection type option.   Note that whether or not this works depends on your network provider: some providers will allow socket connections over WAP2, while others do not. Unfortunately, mine (AT&T) does not — so I could not fully test this.  I would appreciate hearing from anybody who is able to use WAP2 as a connection type.

That’s all for now…

Please continue to post feedback here.  You can also post bugs and feedback to the issue tracker and/or feature request tracker pages for the project — sourceforge allows you to post anonymously, so registration is not required in order to do this.   (However, if you want to receive replies and feedback, you’ll need to register..) I have seen quite a few duplicates, so please take a moment to search for your issue before reporting it.

Based on the questions posted here in comments, and some of the feature requests posted, I’m hoping to get a FAQ page online over the next week.  I’ll also be getting back to a weekly releases for the most part.

’til then, enjoy — and please feel free to spread the word, I think we’re stable enough now that most people will not encounter significant issues using BBSSH.

Things are taking a bit longer than I expected to get the next bbssh release out — I’m currently struggling with converting the underlying encryption technology to the native BB platform encryption. There are quite a few benefits: it will give support for more encryption algorithms, reduce memory usage, and reduce the installable size. From what preliminary results are showing it may also be a little easier on the battery.

It’s turning out a bit trickier than I expected though. On the one hand, it’s been an uphill battle. On the other hand, I’ve been learning quite a bit about cryptography

Expect an update sometime later this week. There are other fixes included too — so if things remain stalled for too long I’ll release an update that doesn’t include the crypto changes.

For those of you using BBSSH (or midpssh), do you still need SSH v1 support? It seems that the de facto standard is v2 these days, and has been for the last several years. OpenSSH itself has been defaulting to ssh-v1 being disabled in the latest versions.

So I’m wondering if you still find yourselves connecting to servers that do not support ssh v2? If there’s no audience for it, I can discontinue v1 support in BBSSH and shave off a few KB.

Please reply below and let me know.

1.1.5 is now available, and it’s a big one – many fixes and some minor enhancements as well.  This download is available for OS 4.6 and later.

First, the important bit: files can be downloaded OTA here:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/bbssh/1.1.5/BBSSH.jad

Several people have reported  trouble with the sourceforge downloads — so if that doesn’t succeed, you can also grab the files here:

http://marcparadise.com/files/BBSSH.jad

Important: installing this version will require you to re-create your sessions.  Some internals for session have changed, and your sessions saved under 1.1.4 are no longer compatible.  You can expect this to have one or two more occurrences, at least until I can get versioning in place before BBSSH goes to Beta.

I’ve started using the sourceforge.net tracker for managing features and bug reports — conveniently, that also makes it easier to report on what’s changed…

• Bug Fixes
• New Features
• Several internal/cleanup changes have been made.

Here are a couple of known issues:

• A new issue has been introduced: the input window overlay now appears centered on the screen.  This is cosmetic only, and has no effect on functionality.
• Storm users will find that the default binding for the CTRL key (SYM) does not work for them, because the SYM softkey cannot be bound on the Storm.  Unfortunately, I have no workaround for this, but the key-binding customization functionality should be ready in 1.1.6.  This will allow you to re-map the CTRL key to a different hard key of your choice.

Here’s some additional info that didn’t make it into the tracker:

• Key binding configuration is still in progress.  However, you can (for the most part) now view how keys are bound.    From the main menu, chooise “Key bindings”.  Press the key or key combination that you want to view, and it will display whatever is mapped to that combination currently — along with a detailed description what the mapping means.

Here are some battery-saving hints, but first a quick comment:

• If you know that your SSH server has a SendClientKeepalive value, you can very likely set the new  “Client Keepalive Interval” in the BBSSH connection settings to 0, disabling it.
• If you have control over the server configuration, you can also change the SendClientKeepalive interval to a higher number, such as 300 seconds.   These two changes will mean that instead of 3 messages every minute of idle time, there will be one message exchanged every 5 minutes.
• Use the input window overlay as often as possible instead of typing directly — typing directly creates a lot more network traffic and causes much more frequent screen refreshes.  This does have a noticeable effect on your battery life.

A couple of notes based on feedback received:

• I do plan on making specialized builds for 4.5, 4.7 (Storm) and 5.0+ devices. However, all of the basic functionality needs to be completed first.  Based on current progress, I would expect that to be within the next few weeks. At the moment, any device running 4.6 or later should work without issues.  However, new platform features won’t be used yet.  Additionally, 4.7+ and Storm/Storm2 users will likely have some issues such as the “CTRL” key mapping problem outlined above.
• If you encounter a menu item that doesn’t work, chances are very good that it’s a placeholder for functionality that hasn’t been completed yet.  Before we get out of alpha, all such items will be fully functional.
• BBSSH can exist alongside MidpSSH without any troubles.

I think that’s all I have for tonight.  Thanks once again to those of you taking the time to test this out. Please continue to post feedback here. If you’ve got a sourceforge.net account you can also post bugs and feedback to the issue tracker and/or feature request tracker pages for the project.