Can mina sshd be used in Android?

[dllhxll]

Version

2.9.2

Bug description

I try to used mina sshd in Android but I have some problems:

1. in LazyDefaultUserHomeFolderHolder, the path is read from System.getProperty("user.home"). But in Android, System.getProperty("user.home") is null. Will this be a problem?
2. in ExceptionUtils, sshd uses class javax.management.MBeanException and javax.management.ReflectionException. But they don't exist on Android.

Can mina sshd be used in Android? Or is there any android version of sshd can be used in Android?

Actual behavior

1. I change System.getProperty("user.home") to Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().getAbsolutePath(). Otherwise, sshd can not connect to server.

Expected behavior

sshd can run in android

Relevant log output

No response

Other information

No response

[lgoldstein]

We do not have many requests to run SSHD on Android, so we never invested any R&D on it. That being said, I believe that with a few tweaks (like the one suggested here), it could be made to support Android. Like I said, we do not have many requests to run SSHD on Android, and since our R&D resources are extremely low, we cannot really spend time on it. However, all is not lost - we welcome contributions, so if this piques your interest and you are willing to take the time, you can fork the project, make what changes you think are necessary and then submit a PR. We are more than willing to help with advice if you should need it.

[albertvaka]

Hey, just FYI we do use mina-sshd in Android in the KDE Connect project 🙂

We just updated from v0.14.0 (from 10 years ago) to v2.13.1 😄

We haven't seen an issue with the Exceptions (yet?), but we did have to add a workaround to not use the user.home property.

Other than that, Mina SSHD runs quite well on Android. Since Android 11 (API version 30) it can run unmodified. On older versions it's not possible to use the NativeFileSystemFactory because to access the filesystem you have to use the Storage Access Framework API, so we had to implement our own FileSystemFactory using that, and we even went further and added more compatibility hacks to support down to Android 5.0, but you probably don't want to go that far.

[lgoldstein]

On older versions it's not possible to use the NativeFileSystemFactory because to access the filesystem you have to use the Storage Access Framework API, so we had to implement our own FileSystemFactory

Can you publish the code somewhere and let us take a look at it ? Perhaps we can incorporate it into the standard MINA offering
Thx

[albertvaka]

The code is open source (GPL2 & GPL3) and can be found in https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-android/-/tree/master/src/org/kde/kdeconnect/Plugins/SftpPlugin

[lgoldstein]

Great - thanks...

[tomaswolf]

Probably you all are aware of this already and I'm making a fool of myself by stating the obvious :-) : the GPL (any version) is incompatible with the APL.

[albertvaka]

We could honestly re-license this portion of code if you guys really want it, but we had to make so many hacks to make it work in older Android versions that I honestly think you are better off supporting only Android 11+ (which only needs the home directory to be overridden to work out of the box).

[lgoldstein]

Probably you all are aware of this already and I'm making a fool of myself by stating the obvious :-) : the GPL (any version) is incompatible with the APL.

I am aware of that (and you are not making a fool of yourself - it is an important observation). At this stage, I just wanted to take a look at the code and get a general impression of its underlying principles. If indeed we reach the decision to do something similar we will certainly need to review and resolve the licensing issues.

[lgoldstein]

I honestly think you are better off supporting only Android 11+

I reached the same conclusion...

[ShellWen]

I did some work on #580