Hostname conflicts with putty session names

[Jeremy]

Description:
Hostnames associated with a saved putty session are used if the hostname used to connect in Filezilla matches the putty session name.
In other words: fzsftp.exe loads the hostname to resolve from a putty session that happens to matches the hostname that was originally supplied to it.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a putty profile named "foo", with hostname "foobar"
2. Create a Filezilla SFTP site profile with hostname "foo" (name can be anything)
3. Enable debug output.
4. Initiate a connect to your filezilla site.

Output:

Command: open "anonymous@foo" 22
Trace:   psftp: Implicit session load.
Trace:   Looking up host "foobar"
Error:   ssh_init: Host does not exist

Result: It attempts to resolve "foobar"
Expected result: It should resolve "foo"

Comment: This is perhaps acceptable behaviour for psftp when using from the command line, but is unexpected behaviour for Filezilla.

[David]

One suggestion is to remove this feature in psftp which is what the attached patch does.

[Jeremy]

Replying to gronsaken:

One suggestion is to remove this feature in psftp which is what the attached patch does.

Thanks Gronsaken. May I submit this patch for review?

[David]

Replying to kizzard:

Replying to gronsaken:

One suggestion is to remove this feature in psftp which is what the attached patch does.

Thanks Gronsaken. May I submit this patch for review?

Sure thing.

[Christopher K.]

Please do not simply remove implicit session loading. Why? It is extremely useful. It is the only way FileZilla can prompt for a passphrase (not using pageant).
How you can use this:

• make a putty session for your host with the passphrase-protected key assigned
• save it under some name (e.g. "foo")
• configure a FileZilla Server with "interactive" authentication, username saved and the putty's session-name as hostname (e.g. "foo")

Then when you connect to the server in filezilla, it will look up the session and connect to it. Putty can ask you for the passphrase (unlike FileZilla), so a popup will show up where you are asked for the passphrase.

If you remove this, there will be no possibility to use passphrase-protected keys in FileZilla without pageant anymore.

I think this bug will not affect many people as you mostly use hostnames as putty session names. And if you do this, this "bug" is a great feature because FileZilla will magically find the correct keyfile and prompt for the passphrase. (Although I had problems with some hostnames (subdomains) as session-names where the putty session was not looked up correctly automatically.)

Maybe one solution might be to only look up sessions if no such host exists. Or if the hostname of the session and FileZilla are identical/have the same IP.