From which hosts have I sshed

Question

If I'm in a terminal and I ssh into a new host, then ssh to another host, then another etc., is there a way to determine this chain of hosts other than recursively exiting and seeing where I end up?

Answer 1

There are variables called SSH_CLIENT and SSH_CONNECTION that show in your current shell where you ssh'd from and which IP you came in on, but that only shows for the last connection. There are commands you can send to each ssh client connection (such as <RET><RET>~C to open the command line), but this is limited to just a few things. Maybe the most interested to you would be ~#, which shows connection info, but it doesn't show hosts.

If you can keep track of how many times you press ~ after <RET><RET>, you can background connection N in your chain starting from the end and in turn echo $SSH_CONNECTION each time to see where it goes. When you get back to your host, you'll need to foreground them all again with fg.

I guess my question for you would be, why do you need to know and do you need to know often?

Answer 2

Run netstat -t -n|grep 22 (replace 22 with port number of your ssh-server if you changed it), at least you know the IP address of the host you are coming from. Or try who