Hardcoding host's IP address in PuTTY for windows

After having putty.exe downloaded onto some windows machine from my http server, I decided I’d hack and patch its source a little to hardcode my host’s IP address into the “Host” field, just so I could be a teensy bit lazier. In the second part of this post, I remove the “hardcoded” from the equation.

In case you’ven’t done that yet, download putty’s source repo:

git clone git://git.tartarus.org/simon/putty.git

Hardcoding works by providing -DHARDCODED_ADDRESS to the make through XFLAGS, which, in turn, is used in windows/window.c’s WinMain procedure right after the command line argument handling.

diff --git a/windows/window.c b/windows/window.c
index fc51e57..77d24ee 100644
--- a/windows/window.c
+++ b/windows/window.c
@@ -596,6 +596,10 @@ int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE inst, HINSTANCE prev, LPSTR cmdline, int show)
        }
    }

+#ifdef HARDCODED_ADDRESS
+    conf_set_str(conf, CONF_host, HARDCODED_ADDRESS);
+#endif
+
    cmdline_run_saved(conf);

    if (loaded_session || got_host)

To patch it,
run git apply
copy the patch above into the terminal while the command is waiting,
press enter, control + d
or use any other equivalent mechanism and you should see this upon issuing git status.

% git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

        modified:   window.c

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

As for building it, I consulted blog.myconan.net/posts/3311. My build is cron-scheduled¹ and pay attention to the interesting bits in lines 1² and 8:

 1  externalipaddr() { dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com }
 2  perl mkfiles.pl
 3  cd windows
 4  sed -ri 's/-mno-cygwin//g' Makefile.cyg
 5  make \
 6     VER="-DSNAPSHOT=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d') -DSVN_REV='$(svnversion)' -DMODIFIED" \
 7     TOOLPATH=i486-mingw32- \
 8     XFLAGS="-DCOVERITY -DHARDCODED_ADDRESS=\"\\\"$(externalipaddr)\\\"\"" \
 9     -f Makefile.cyg \
10     putty.exe

If you winced because of the slashes and quotes of line 8, let me assure you that some of them are really needed. The -D passess the variable to C as a macro, which means that it must have " " quotes to make C think it’s a string. But you also need them to prevent bash from splitting XFLAGS into multiple arguments.

If this doesn’t work or you’re very glad it does, feel free to try to contact me.

Changing the host field to HTTP’s Host value [2016-09-14]

Since the whole reason of doing this was to offer it for downloading from HTTP, we can use it to make this work without any hardcodes. The way it works for me is also a little complicated, but not too much if you’re familiar with SSH.

We must then make the HTTP server, in my case lighttpd, treat putty.exe as a script because otherwise it wouldn’t change upon every changing host. For me, the possible values are local, external adresses and /etc/hosts domains.

Now to do that, add this to /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

cgi.assign = (
    # .. possibly something had there already
    "putty.exe"  => "/usr/bin/ruby"
)

Now for the putty.exe, I use:

CGI.new.out('Content-type': 'application/x-msdownload') do
  host = ENV['HTTP_HOST'].scan(/[a-zA-Z\.0-9]+/).join[0..127]
  %x{ssh 127.0.0.1 <<< "putty #{ host }"}
  File.read("#{ ENV['HOME'] }/code/cache/putty/windows/putty.exe")
end

For security reasons, I use only a safe portion of the HTTP_HOST that CGI passed onto us. I also didn’t actually let the HTTP server build it — I let it make a whitelisted call to my regular server user. That works via /etc/ssh/sshd_config, ~http/.ssh/config:

% grep 'Match User raitis Host 127.0' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Match User raitis Host 127.0.0.1
    AuthorizedKeysFile ~raitis/.ssh/remote_authorized_keys
    ForceCommand ~raitis/code/desktop/remote/shell

% cat .ssh/config
Ciphers aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,aes128-cbc,3des-cbc
MACs hmac-md5,hmac-sha1,hmac-ripemd160
PubKeyAcceptedKeyTypes ssh-rsa

Host 127.0.0.1
    User raitis
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/remote

That’s the gist of it, but you’ve also to write your own shell that’ll correctly start the build process whilst taking the putty HOSTHERE(from putty.exe CGI script) on the stdin into account.