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DodoSSH/tests/DodoSSH.Client.Ssh.Tests/SshServerFixture.cs
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Stop the SSH suite's server refusing connections at random
The suite fails intermittently with SshConnectionException "The connection
was closed by the remote host", within tens of milliseconds, on whichever
test happens to connect first. It has been seen in CI and reproduces
locally. This raises sshd's MaxStartups in the fixture, which is the most
likely cause and is worth doing regardless.

sshd's compiled-in default is 10:30:100: past ten unauthenticated
connections in flight it refuses new ones at random, thirty percent of the
time, rising to always at a hundred. The image ships the line commented
out, so that default was what ran. xUnit runs test classes in parallel and
most of the classes here open a connection, so ten in flight is reachable
during the opening seconds — and a refusal presents to the client exactly
as observed, because a dropped connection and a server that never answered
are indistinguishable from that end.

◆ IT IS A MITIGATION AND NOT A DEMONSTRATED CURE, AND THE COMMENT SAYS SO.

The flake rate could not be measured. On the Windows development machine
the identical unmodified suite ran 85/85 clean and, an hour later, failed
13 runs out of 15; a Linux container gave 30/30 clean and then failed on
the first run of the next batch. Docker throughput on that host swings far
enough to swamp the effect, so every before/after comparison taken there
was noise — including two that were briefly believed.

It is committed on the narrower argument that it is right either way. A
connection throttle is hardening this suite has no interest in
reproducing: it exists to test an SSH client, not to survive a rate limit,
and a test server that drops connections at random is a bad test server
whether or not it is the cause of this particular flake.

The other candidate was the reload window — pkill returns when SIGHUP is
delivered, not when sshd has finished closing its listeners and re-execing,
so a connection immediately afterwards can be refused the same way. A wait
that required three consecutive banner reads before returning was written
and then removed: it could not be shown to change anything either, and a
fixture carrying two unproven fixes for one symptom is worse than one,
because the next person has to disprove both. Both candidates, and how to
tell them apart with sshd's own log, are recorded in the fixture and in
docs/platform-flags.md.
2026-08-10 11:46:14 +02:00

345 lines
16 KiB
C#

using System.Security.Cryptography;
using DotNet.Testcontainers.Builders;
using DotNet.Testcontainers.Containers;
using Xunit;
namespace DodoSSH.Client.Ssh.Tests;
/// <summary>
/// A real OpenSSH server in a container, with password and public-key auth both enabled.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// <para>
/// One container per assembly. Everything the SSH layer needs to be right about — PTY
/// allocation, window-change requests, host key encoding, key formats — is behaviour of a real
/// sshd, and none of it can be established against a mock.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// The image is Alpine-based, so <c>stty</c> comes from busybox. Its <c>stty size</c> prints
/// "rows cols", which is what the resize assertions read.
/// </para>
/// </remarks>
public sealed class SshServerFixture : IAsyncLifetime
{
/// <summary>The account tests authenticate as.</summary>
public const string Username = "dodo";
/// <summary>Password for password authentication.</summary>
public const string Password = "correct-horse-battery-staple";
/// <summary>
/// The port sshd listens on <em>inside</em> the container, rather than the one it is published on.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// What anything reaching this server from within the container's own network namespace has to use —
/// which includes a forward opened on a connection to it. <see cref="Port"/> is the mapped port on the
/// host and is not listening in there. See <c>LoopbackProxyTests</c>, where the difference is the whole
/// shape of the test.
/// </remarks>
public const int InternalPort = SshPort;
private const int SshPort = 2222;
private readonly SemaphoreSlim sftpGate = new(1, 1);
private IContainer? container;
private ISftpSession? sftp;
/// <summary>Host port the container's sshd is published on.</summary>
public ushort Port => container!.GetMappedPublicPort(SshPort);
/// <summary>Host the container is reachable at.</summary>
public string Host => container!.Hostname;
/// <summary>An RSA key pair whose public half is authorized on the server.</summary>
public RSA ClientKey { get; } = RSA.Create(3072);
/// <inheritdoc />
public async ValueTask InitializeAsync()
{
container = new ContainerBuilder("linuxserver/openssh-server:latest")
.WithEnvironment("PUID", "1000")
.WithEnvironment("PGID", "1000")
.WithEnvironment("USER_NAME", Username)
.WithEnvironment("USER_PASSWORD", Password)
.WithEnvironment("PASSWORD_ACCESS", "true")
.WithEnvironment("SUDO_ACCESS", "false")
.WithEnvironment("PUBLIC_KEY", ExportOpenSshPublicKey(ClientKey))
.WithPortBinding(SshPort, assignRandomHostPort: true)
// The entrypoint generates host keys, rewrites sshd_config and installs the authorized
// key before sshd is usable, so a published port is not readiness. Both conditions are
// needed: the log line proves the authorized key was installed (a connection accepted
// before that fails public-key auth), and the port check proves sshd is actually
// accepting. The message is this image's own wording — "Server listening on" is
// OpenSSH's and never appears here, which is a wait that hangs rather than fails.
.WithWaitStrategy(Wait.ForUnixContainer()
.UntilMessageIsLogged("Public key from env variable added")
.UntilCommandIsCompleted("sh", "-c", $"netstat -ltn | grep -q ':{SshPort}'"))
.Build();
await container.StartAsync();
await AllowTcpForwardingAsync();
}
/// <summary>
/// Lets this server open the direct-tcpip channels a forward is made of.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// <para>
/// ◆ <b>The image ships <c>AllowTcpForwarding no</c>, and nothing says so at the point it bites.</b> A
/// dynamic forward starts perfectly happily — it is a local listener, and opening it asks the server
/// nothing — and then every connection through it is refused when the channel is opened. SSH.NET
/// reports that as <c>SOCKS5: General failure</c> from the proxy, which names neither the server nor
/// the setting, and is what the first run of <c>LoopbackProxyTests</c> collected.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// Patched after start rather than baked in, because the image's entrypoint writes its configuration
/// itself on every boot — a mounted file would be overwritten before sshd read it. sshd re-reads on
/// <c>SIGHUP</c> and applies the result to connections made after that, and the readiness wait has
/// already run, so nothing here races the boot.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// ◆ <b><c>/config/sshd/sshd_config</c>, and there are two.</b> The image also carries
/// <c>/etc/ssh/sshd_config</c>, which looks like the file to patch, reads identically, and is not the
/// one the running server was started with — patching it changes the text and nothing else, which is a
/// fix that appears to work and leaves the failure exactly where it was. Measured with <c>find</c>
/// rather than assumed, after the first version of this method did precisely that.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// It is on for the whole assembly rather than for the one test that needs it. Forwarding is off in
/// this image as hardening, not as a behaviour worth reproducing: nothing else here opens a channel of
/// any kind, so allowing it changes what exactly one suite can do and what none of the others see.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// ◆ <b><c>MaxStartups</c> is raised here too, against a flake this suite has and that this change is
/// a mitigation for rather than a proven cure.</b> The distinction is stated because the evidence
/// stops short of the claim, and a later reader deserves to know which.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// What is established: sshd's compiled-in default is <c>10:30:100</c> — past ten
/// <em>unauthenticated</em> connections in flight it refuses new ones at random, thirty percent of the
/// time, rising to always at a hundred — and the image ships the line commented out, so that default
/// was what ran. xUnit runs test classes in parallel and most classes here open a connection, so ten
/// in flight is reachable in the opening seconds. A refused connection presents to the client as
/// <c>SshConnectionException: The connection was closed by the remote host</c> within tens of
/// milliseconds, on whichever test connects at the wrong moment — which is exactly the observed
/// failure, seen in CI and reproduced locally.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// What is <em>not</em> established is that this limit is the only cause, because the flake rate could
/// not be measured reliably. On the development machine the identical unmodified suite ran 85/85 clean
/// and, an hour later, failed 13 runs out of 15 — Docker throughput on that host swings far enough to
/// swamp the effect being measured. Any before/after comparison taken there is noise, and two were,
/// before that was noticed.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// It is committed anyway, on the narrower argument that it is right regardless: a connection throttle
/// is hardening this suite has no interest in reproducing. It exists to test an SSH client, not to
/// survive a rate limit, and a test server that drops connections at random is a bad test server
/// whether or not it is the cause of this particular flake.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// <b>Not fixed by serialising the suite</b>, which would have hidden it and cost the parallelism, and
/// not by retrying the connect, which would have made the client's own reconnect behaviour untestable
/// by burying it in the fixture. The limit is a property of a hardened server that this suite has no
/// interest in reproducing — it exists to test an SSH client, not to survive a throttle.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// Replaced in place rather than appended, because sshd_config takes the <em>first</em> value it finds
/// for a keyword: an appended line would be dead the day the image ships an uncommented one of its own.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// ◆ <b>The reload window is the other candidate, and it is deliberately not guarded against.</b>
/// <c>SIGHUP</c> makes sshd close its listeners and re-execute itself, and <c>pkill</c> returns when
/// the signal is delivered rather than when that has finished — so in principle a connection made
/// immediately afterwards is refused, producing this same exception. A wait that opened connections
/// until the server answered with its banner three times running was written, and then removed: it
/// could not be shown to change anything either, and a fixture carrying two unproven fixes for one
/// symptom is worse than one, because the next person has to disprove both.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// If this flake returns, that is the next thing to try. Two things to know before trying it: the two
/// causes are indistinguishable from the client, so a fix can only be judged by a repeat run and never
/// by whether the next run passes — and the repeat run has to happen somewhere with stable Docker
/// throughput, which the development machine is not. Better still, make sshd say why: raise its
/// <c>LogLevel</c> here, disable Ryuk so the container outlives the run, and read
/// <c>docker logs</c>. A <c>MaxStartups</c> refusal names itself there; a reload does not.
/// </para>
/// </remarks>
private async Task AllowTcpForwardingAsync()
{
var result = await container!.ExecAsync([
"sh",
"-c",
"sed -i 's/^AllowTcpForwarding no/AllowTcpForwarding yes/' /config/sshd/sshd_config"
+ " && sed -i 's/^#*MaxStartups .*/MaxStartups 200/' /config/sshd/sshd_config"
+ " && pkill -HUP sshd",
]);
if (result.ExitCode != 0)
{
throw new InvalidOperationException(
$"Could not reconfigure the test server: {result.Stderr}");
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Adds one <c>authorized_keys</c> line to the account tests authenticate as.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// <para>
/// The fixture's own key arrives through the image's <c>PUBLIC_KEY</c> variable, which takes one. This
/// is for the case that needs a second: proving a key <em>this client generated</em> authenticates
/// against a real sshd, which is the only test that can establish the hand-written
/// <c>openssh-key-v1</c> encoding is right. A parser accepting the file is weaker — SSH.NET could be
/// forgiving about something OpenSSH is not.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// sshd re-reads <c>authorized_keys</c> on each authentication attempt, so nothing has to be restarted.
/// </para>
/// </remarks>
public async ValueTask AuthorizeAsync(string publicKeyLine, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
ArgumentException.ThrowIfNullOrWhiteSpace(publicKeyLine);
// Single-quoted in the shell and the line is base64 plus an algorithm name and a comment, so there
// is nothing in it a quote could end. Asserted rather than assumed all the same: a silent failure
// here would show up as an authentication error in a test whose subject is the key encoding, which
// is the most misleading way for this to break.
var result = await container!.ExecAsync(
["sh", "-c", $"echo '{publicKeyLine.Trim()}' >> /config/.ssh/authorized_keys"],
cancellationToken);
if (result.ExitCode != 0)
{
throw new InvalidOperationException(
$"Could not install the public key in the container: {result.Stderr}");
}
}
/// <summary>
/// One file-transfer session, opened on first use and shared by every test that wants one.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// <para>
/// Shared rather than opened per test, and that is a limit of the server rather than an optimisation.
/// sshd's <c>MaxStartups</c> drops connections at random once enough are part-way through a handshake,
/// and this client's first contact with an unknown host is a connection deliberately <em>refused</em> at
/// the host key — so a suite that opened its own session per test made two handshakes per test and
/// pushed the whole assembly over the threshold. What that looks like is unrelated tests failing with
/// "the connection was closed by the remote host", a different few each run.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// Safe to share because an SFTP session holds no per-test state: every test here works in a directory
/// named after itself. See <c>ISftpSession</c>, which is one channel and is used by one caller at a
/// time.
/// </para>
/// </remarks>
public async ValueTask<ISftpSession> SftpAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
await sftpGate.WaitAsync(cancellationToken);
try
{
if (sftp is not null)
{
return sftp;
}
var knownHosts = new InMemoryKnownHostStore();
var factory = new SshNetConnectionFactory(knownHosts);
var request = new SshConnectionRequest(
Host, Port, Username, new SshPasswordCredential(Password));
try
{
// Learned by being refused, which is the only way this client learns a host key.
return sftp = await factory.OpenSftpAsync(request, cancellationToken);
}
catch (SshHostKeyUnknownException unknown)
{
await knownHosts.TrustAsync(unknown.Presentation, cancellationToken);
}
return sftp = await factory.OpenSftpAsync(request, cancellationToken);
}
finally
{
sftpGate.Release();
}
}
/// <inheritdoc />
public async ValueTask DisposeAsync()
{
if (sftp is not null)
{
await sftp.DisposeAsync();
}
sftpGate.Dispose();
if (container is not null)
{
await container.DisposeAsync();
}
ClientKey.Dispose();
}
/// <summary>
/// Renders an RSA public key in the single-line <c>authorized_keys</c> format.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// Hand-encoded because there is no BCL helper. The SSH wire format is a sequence of
/// length-prefixed strings: the algorithm name, then the exponent, then the modulus — both
/// as signed big-endian integers, which is why a leading zero byte is prepended when the
/// high bit is set. Getting that wrong yields a key sshd silently ignores.
/// </remarks>
private static string ExportOpenSshPublicKey(RSA rsa)
{
var parameters = rsa.ExportParameters(includePrivateParameters: false);
using var blob = new MemoryStream();
WriteSshString(blob, "ssh-rsa"u8.ToArray());
WriteSshMpint(blob, parameters.Exponent!);
WriteSshMpint(blob, parameters.Modulus!);
return $"ssh-rsa {Convert.ToBase64String(blob.ToArray())} dodossh-test";
}
private static void WriteSshString(Stream destination, byte[] value)
{
Span<byte> length = stackalloc byte[4];
System.Buffers.Binary.BinaryPrimitives.WriteUInt32BigEndian(length, (uint)value.Length);
destination.Write(length);
destination.Write(value);
}
private static void WriteSshMpint(Stream destination, byte[] value)
{
// Signed big-endian: a high bit set would otherwise read as negative.
if (value.Length > 0 && (value[0] & 0x80) != 0)
{
var padded = new byte[value.Length + 1];
value.CopyTo(padded, 1);
WriteSshString(destination, padded);
return;
}
WriteSshString(destination, value);
}
}
/// <summary>Shares one SSH server across every test class in the assembly.</summary>
[CollectionDefinition(Name)]
public sealed class SshCollection : ICollectionFixture<SshServerFixture>
{
/// <summary>Collection name.</summary>
public const string Name = "ssh";
}