Ajaxterm is a web application that uses Python and AJAX to make a terminal that you can log in to over the web. I decided to try it out tonight…

The installation is easy. Basically unpack the tar file somewhere and run the ajaxterm.py script. With no options specified, it will open localhost:8080 as a web server. If you connect to that port, it will attempt to log you in as if you had typed (as the user running the script) ’ssh localhost’. Seemed to work.

Next, I modified /etc/conf.d/apache2 to include mod_proxy:

APACHE2_OPTS="-D PYTHON -D DAV -D DAV_FS -D SVN -D PROXY"

And then added the following to my virtualhost definition in /etc/apache2/modules.d/40_mod_ssl.conf:

ProxyRequests Off <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyPass /ajaxterm/ http://localhost:8080/ ProxyPassReverse /ajaxterm/ http://localhost:8080/

Restart Apache (apache2ctl stop && apache2ctl startssl) and then I could connect from another host to https://metis/ajaxterm/ and get a terminal session going:

That’s a screenshot of the terminal running in my browser. It’s really slow in responding, but it does indeed work.

My only complaint iis that it doesn’t actually give you a login when you connect. It just runs the ssh command specified. So although I could change the user with ’ssh user@localhost’, I don’t see any easy way to get Ajaxterm to support multiple users.

Interesting proof of concept though.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Linux, Python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.