Konsole has too easy shortcut to extremely dangerous functionality

[tdn]

Binary package hint: kdebase

Yesterday I learned about a "feature" in Konsole that had nearly ruined several servers in critical productions systems.

I use Konsole every day to ssh to servers and perform system maintenance and development work.

Yesterday I had ssh connections open to several production servers. Each session in a different Konsole tab. We had some strange problems on a database server where I needed to to some strace and ltrace and some work inside a chroot. Konsole has a shortcut to "New tab" on Shitf+Ctrl+n and "New Window" on Shift+Ctrl+m. At some point, I must have hit Shift+Ctrl+, (comma is just next to n on the keyboard). I did not notice that I hit ',' and continued my work.

Well... Suddenly a lot of things started to act weird. I had co-worker come and see. For instance, a process that I started would always start two instances and there was a race condition on who would bind to a tcp port. After a while, we figured out that somehow the feature "Copy Input To > All Tabs in current window" was enabled. The shortcut for this functionality was -- ctrl+shift+,.

This means that *every command that I wrote in one of my ssh sessions were also run on EVERY open ssh session on different servers*. In several of the sessions I was logged in as root. As you can imagine, this could have been a disaster.

After the fact, we noticed that a little red exclamation mark appeared in the tab. However, this exclamation mark did not have any help text or anything. Also, none of us noticed it before it was too late.

Although useful, this is an *extremely* dangerous feature. It should definitely be more difficult to turn on. At least it should not have a shortcut that are 1 key away from a harmless and frequently used feature like "new window".

Possible solutions:
1: Remove the shortcut mapping for this feature. This way, people who use it can set a shortcut themselves, if they need it. My guess is that, even if you use this feature, you use it seldom. (I myself use clusterssh for these purposes).

2: Set the shortcut key to something different. Preferably more difficult to hit by accident. Mayby involving both Ctrl+Shift+Alt.

3: Make the feature more "noisy". The tiny red exclamation mark in the tab is way too descrete. Have an alert box open and explain that the feature was turned on. Make the user click OK. Maybe with an option not see this message again. Maybe keep the red exclamation mark also, but add some help text to it, so that an explanation appears when you hover it with the mouse cursor.

#3 could be combined with 1 or 2.

I really hope that you will look into this. It is only a matter of time before this will cause serious data loss or worse for someone.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: konsole 4:4.4.2-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-22.33-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-22-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri May 21 10:07:05 2010
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100427)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_DK.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/zsh
SourcePackage: kdebase

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

This function seems to be gone in KDE 4.5.