7

I'd like to remotely administer my Linux machine at home whilst I'm at work. Only ports 80 and 443 are avaiable, through an HTTP proxy. I don't want to install tunnelling software.

What I really need is something that'll run on my server and display a console inside a web browser. Is anything like that around?

4 Answers 4

9

(Linux) Rackspace Cloud Servers allow you to use a browser based terminal, so I searched for something like that and found this: Ajaxterm. You can run it through port 443.

Ajaxterm


UPDATE

For the last year I have been using shellinabox, which I find to work much better than Ajaxterm. It actually works incredibly well and is very usable.

Tip: You can Paste in Google Chrome with CTRL+SHIFT+V.

shellinabox

1
  • Hey, that's a pretty cool application! Jul 12, 2011 at 1:58
4

I know webmin provides this functionality as I use it at work on an Ubuntu box.

2
  • Do you know which web min module does this?
    – TopBanana
    Jul 11, 2011 at 21:58
  • Mine dine it out the box, are you using ubuntu? Or some other distro
    – squareborg
    Jul 11, 2011 at 22:05
1

Assuming that 80 and 443 really are the only available ports (there's an outbound firewall at work?), my solution would be to configure SSH at home to listen on one of those ports, and connect from work with a terminal, or Putty if you're using windows.

Find your sshd config file on the home server (/etc/ssh/sshd_config would be the first place I'd check) and change the Port setting to, say, 443. Restart the ssh daemon, and you should be able to connect from work using

ssh -p 443 homeIP

Of course, I'm assuming you don't want to run a web-server on your home machine.

3
  • Thanks for the reply. The httpsvtraffic goes via a proxy server, I don't think I'll be able to route ssh traffic through it will I? Quite happy running a web server at home
    – TopBanana
    Jul 11, 2011 at 21:47
  • Configuring ssh in the way I've suggested would prevent you from running a web server at home (or at least a secure one, listening on 443). Also, my solution isn't particularly elegant, hence it's getting modded down. Are you absolutely sure you can't get out of work on port 22?
    – mjk
    Jul 11, 2011 at 21:59
  • @mjk It's being modded down because HTTP proxies don't proxy SSH traffic. May 25, 2012 at 13:06
1

I'm in a similar position - at work I am only allowed to connect to the Internet using a web proxy, nothing else works and while it is possible to tunnel out of port 443 using SSH, that's not too helpful when using a client Windows PC where installing applications and binding ports isn't allowed.

I used to use Ajaxterm, but it doesn't seem to work properly in modern browsers - pressing backspace tells Chrome to go back in its history for example. After a bit too much Googling I came across http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ which does the same thing, but works much better (install it the same way as Ajaxterm using a proxy redirect in Apache).

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .