== An interesting bit of ssh and sshd behavior

We have a ssh keypair that's used to let an automated script have very
limited access to a remote system. As usual, we set up a whole host
of restrictions in the target account's ((authorized_keys)); we force
a specific command, we only accept the key from the host we expect it
from, and we specify the whole raft of no-* options, including _no-pty_.
The command that gets forced for this particular keypair reads various
things that it needs from standard input (ie, the script).

Recently, we wound up doing plain '_ssh login@host_' as part of trying
to debug a problem. My expectation was that this would behave just like
the normal '_ssh login@host nominal-command_' (since the command was
being forced on the remote end anyways). Instead, what happened was that
the connection stalled, (apparently) doing nothing; you would type at it
and nothing happened. In fact, nothing even appeared (your typing wasn't
echoed).

What turned out to be happening is this: ~~ssh doesn't notice if the
remote end refuses to create a pty~~. Instead it carries on exactly as
if it was talking to a pty, so it puts the local terminal into raw mode
and then sends your untranslated input to the other end (character by
character). And plain '_ssh login@host_' tries to do a login session,
which asks for a pty, while the remote end refused to set up a pty
and forced the command (instead of running any sort of shell).

When this happens, you get no visible output from your typing because
ssh leaves it up to the remote end to do that in pty mode. Also, you
generally get no visible reaction to what you've entered because when
you hit 'return', ssh sent the raw return (as a _\r_), instead of the
cooked newline (_\n_) that the other end is looking for. So in our
case, the remote command thought that we were just typing a really,
really long single line of input that we hadn't finished yet.

(Trivia: if you ever want to see if this is happening to you, type a
Control-J; this sends _\n_ directly. This is also useful to know if
your terminal winds up in raw mode because a program crashed.)