Short IT recipes: pi-intercom over SSH: the 30-second guide

Friday, August 28, 2026

pi-intercom over SSH: the 30-second guide

pi-intercom is same-machine only — it talks via a Unix socket at ~/.pi/agent/intercom/broker.sock. sshfs won't forward it (sockets aren't regular files). Forward the socket itself.

1. Keep the broker alive on host A

                                                                                                   
   pi
                                                                                                                   
   ls -l ~/.pi/agent/intercom/broker.sock  # must exist

2. Forward it to host B — don't use ~ after :

                                                                                                                
   rm -f ~/.pi/agent/intercom/broker.sock
                                                                               
   REMOTE=$(ssh user@hostA 'echo $HOME/.pi/agent/intercom/broker.sock')
                                                 
   ssh -nNT -o StreamLocalBindUnlink=yes -L $HOME/.pi/agent/intercom/broker.sock:$REMOTE user@hostA

3. Use it

                                                                                                                
   pi  
                                                                                                                 
   intercom list  # shows sessions from both hosts

Troubleshooting channel 1: open failed: remote socket missing (broker died after 5s idle), ssh -v, or AllowStreamLocalForwarding no on hostA (sudo sshd -T | grep allowstreamlocalforwarding).