A Rust Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for remote server administration and interactive network-device / console management over SSH, Telnet, and Serial, with a set of bundled skills and agents.

SSH-Connect is the Rust successor to the TypeScript SSH-MCP tool. It combines two earlier Rust projects into one binary:

• Server operations — Linux/Ubuntu administration (nginx, SSL/certbot, UFW, packages, deployment, systemd, MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, Docker, logs, processes, files, cron). Each command runs on its own SSH channel and reports an exit code; file transfer uses SFTP; optional trust-on-first-use host-key checking is available.
• Interactive console — prompt-aware management of switches, routers, and consoles over SSH (PTY), Telnet, and Serial, with pagination handling, enable/login flows, and fleet commands. A broker (Windows named pipe / Unix domain socket) lets multiple MCP clients share one set of live sessions and serial ports.

Built on the rmcp MCP SDK. SSH is pure Rust via russh (no OpenSSL/C dependency).

Download: prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows are on the Releases page — no Rust toolchain required to run them.

Both families run in one process and share the broker, so a session opened by one MCP client is usable from another.

• Session / discovery (interactive): connect, disconnect, list_sessions, list_com_ports, list_hosts
• Interactive command: run_command, run_commands, enable, login, expect_send, run_on_fleet, upload_config, download_config
• Switch convenience: switch_backup_config, switch_network_diagnostics
• SSH server-ops: ssh_connect, ssh_exec, ssh_upload_file, ssh_download_file, ssh_list_files, ssh_disconnect
• VPS / Ubuntu: vps_system_stats, vps_logs, vps_process, vps_file_read, vps_file_ops, vps_cron, ubuntu_service_control, vps_nginx_config, ubuntu_nginx_control, ubuntu_update_packages, ubuntu_ssl_certificate, ubuntu_website_deployment, ubuntu_ufw_firewall, ubuntu_mysql, vps_redis, vps_docker, vps_health_check

On timeout, ssh_exec (and the vps_*/ubuntu_* tools) return an error and make a best-effort attempt to terminate the remote command. The attempt is not guaranteed — OpenSSH may ignore a signal on a non-PTY exec channel. ubuntu_update_packages, ubuntu_ssl_certificate, and vps_docker accept an optional timeoutMs. For operations that can run for minutes, run them detached and poll a log file rather than relying on a long timeout (see the vps-management skill).

• switch-management — operational guidance for switches/routers: vendor idioms, pagination, enable/config, saving, fleet operations, firmware upgrades, console-to-SSH setup.
• vps-management — safe-change discipline and standard workflows (patch + reboot, SSL/certbot troubleshooting, service recovery, long-running-operation polling).
• vps-health-report — a standardized HTML server health report (plus JSON sidecar and delta), driven by vps_health_check.
• health-report — a standardized HTML network-device health report (plus JSON sidecar).

vps-troubleshooter, switch-config-auditor, deployment-runner, fleet-health-reporter, vps-health-reporter.

Requires a recent stable Rust toolchain. Rust dependencies (including rmcp = "1.8" from crates.io) are fetched by Cargo.

cargo build --release
# Binary: target/release/ssh-connect  (ssh-connect.exe on Windows)

Windows and macOS need no system packages. On Linux, the serialport crate (used for list_com_ports and serial console access) needs libudev at build time:

sudo apt-get install -y libudev-dev pkg-config   # Debian/Ubuntu

Prefer not to build from source? Prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows are attached to every tagged release on the Releases page (produced by the release GitHub Actions workflow).

Claude Code:

claude mcp add ssh-connect --scope user -- /path/to/ssh-connect/target/release/ssh-connect

Or in an MCP settings file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ssh-connect": {
      "command": "/path/to/ssh-connect/target/release/ssh-connect"
    }
  }
}

The server speaks MCP over stdio; all logging goes to stderr (set RUST_LOG=info to see broker/role messages).

• Inventory: copy hosts.example.toml to hosts.toml and edit. The connect tool can then reach a device by name alone. Override the path with SSHCONNECT_HOSTS.
• Secrets: prefer environment variables over committing passwords. For host core-sw-01, set SSHCONNECT_CORE_SW_01_PASSWORD (name upper-cased, non-alphanumerics collapsed to _); the same pattern applies to USERNAME, HOST, PORT, KEY_PATH.
• Host-key checking (server-ops SSH): accepts any key by default. Set SSHCONNECT_HOST_KEY_CHECK=tofu (the legacy VPS_HOST_KEY_CHECK is also accepted) to enable trust-on-first-use against ~/.ssh-connect/known_hosts, which refuses a later key mismatch.

The first instance becomes the owner of a per-machine rendezvous endpoint — a named pipe (\\.\pipe\ssh-connect-broker-v1) on Windows, or a Unix domain socket under $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR (falling back to the temp dir) on Linux/macOS — and holds the live connections and COM ports. Later instances act as proxies that forward tools/call to the owner, so a session opened in one client is usable from another and two clients cannot collide on the same serial port. Tool schemas are served locally by every instance. On a platform with neither transport, each instance is a standalone owner.

Limitation: if the owner process exits, existing proxies do not currently re-elect a new owner mid-session — restart the affected client. A newly started instance always elects correctly (and clears a stale socket).

cargo test --bin ssh-connect

Unit tests cover the telnet IAC parser, prompt/ANSI output handling, the host inventory, serial-port probing, and the legacy SSH algorithm set. Protocol and broker behavior are checked by sending an initialize + tools/list sequence to the binary and by running two instances to confirm owner/proxy election.

MIT — see LICENSE.