Remote Terminal?
 

I want to be able to put a website on my server, which will allow me to use the terminal on the server.

i.e. I will have a folder in the www root called /remote and when I get to work I could goto www.sheppardweb.co.uk/remote/ this would then give me some sort of telnet type screen thing, which will allow me to pass commands to the server.

How do I set the server up to do this, and does anyone know of maybe a php package I can put in the /remote directory to allow me to connect to the server.

Or is there anyway I can use telnet from work to do this?

You could easily have a web interface that allowed you to type in commands and have them executed on the server. However, there are a few security issues with doing that :
1. You need to password protect the area in Apache, but Apache password protection is not as strong as Linux password protection.
2. Since the webserver runs as user nobody (or other unprivelaged user) you couldn't run any commands that required root authority. If you allowed root commands to be run, that's an even bigger security hole.

I know that HP-UX has a solution that allows telnet-via-web-browser access to servers; maybe there is a similar solution on Linux.

I have just found that we can use telnet at work, how would I setup the linux box to accept telnet connections, and what port will this usually be on?

Do NOT use telnet. Use SSH (Secure Shell) instead - it has already pretty much dethroned telnet as the standard remote access application. SSH uses, unlike telnet, encryption so passwords and other sensitive information cannot be sniffed across the network.

Your machine is problaby set up to allow incoming SSH connections already. Try accessing it using ssh user@host. So I access my server as ssh hw@blaha.com. The IP address works as well as the hostname so use that if the computer doesn't have a usable DNS name.

You may have to configure the built-in firewall on the server to allow incoming SSH connections in case you're running one. Most distributions provide easy-to-use graphical or non-graphical programs to configure the firewall software.


Håkan

Will this work from a windows xp machine?

thanks, I downloaded prossh and connected fine, cheers

I don't know if Prossh is free or not, but I use PuTTy to SSH when I'm on Windows boxes (that don't have Cygwin installed). PuTTy is free and works well. :)
Here's a direct download link.

Håkan