mercurial hg clone a repo from a server connected through another server

Question

I have three machines

local (windows)
serverA (linux) with username as userA
serverB (linux) with username as userB

I want to clone a hg repository in serverB to my local machine using TortoiseHg for windows. The machine serverB can be sshed only though serverA. So in winScp/PuTTY I use tunneling option to connect to serverB through serverA. But how do I do it in TortoiseHg?

Obviously I cannot use hg clone ssh://userB@serverB://<path to repo>. But is there a way to use multiple ssh commands`. I tried the below approach and it did not work:

$cat ~/.ssh/config

host serverB.example.com serverB
    ProxyCommand /usr/bin/ssh serverA.example.com /usr/bin/nc %h %p

Answer 1

You have the following options:

1. You can forward the ssh port on serverA, in your .ssh/config add something like:

   host serverBtunnel
      LocalForward    2222 serverB.example.com:22
   

   Then start the tunnel (on serverA) with:

   ssh -N serverBtunnel
   

   After this you can clone the repo (from your windows box) using:

   hg clone ssh://userB@serverA:2222//<path to repo>
   

2. Create the tunnel directly from Putty (see here for more details). Basically:

   • You will define and add the tunnel to serverB:
   • Then create the session to serverA (that will have the tunnel defined):

   • This way, on your windows box (assuming that the above session is started), you will be able to clone the repo, using:

     hg clone ssh://userB@localhost:2222//<path to repo>