The sys admin's daily grind: Shell In A Box

Sea Shells in a Box

Article from Issue 167/2014
Author(s):

At some point, any service that can't run fast enough will be put on the web. So, why not do this for remote login? With a little JavaScript and CSS wizardry, a software tool called "Shell In A Box" sends a shell to the browser.

The web login tool I am looking at today is available in many distributions, or you can download it from the website [1]. I got Shell In A Box to jump onto my Kubuntu lab machine like this:

apt-get -fym install shellinabox

It runs as a service in the background, normally listening on port 4200. When I then surf to localhost:4200, I see the Bash login prompt and can log on and go about my work in the normal way (Figure 1). It doesn't even have to be a full login. I can also redirect the output from programs running in Bash to the web.

[...]

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