mindterm - ssh with java applet

ssh is now almost the default way for remote login and management of a Unix/Linux box. Thanks to OpenBSD people for the great work and he great mind to open-source their work, OpenSSH is now shipped with almost all linux distros (I can’t think of any without) and built on most Unix flavors. It is even available on M$ Windoze: for open-sourced offerings, there is OpenSSH server within the full cywin enviroment, or some strip-down evsrion, like CopSSH, ...; recently there is also MinGW based offerring which doesn’t require cygwin1.dll (it is a nightmaire if you have multiple different versions of cygwin1.dll on your windows box). There is freeware product called freeSSHd as well but it is not open-sourced.

Put the availablity of ssh server aside, you also need some ssh client program to access an ssh server. On Unix/Linux, this is a non-issue. On windows there is open-sourced putty, as well as the ssh client program coming with openssh package (either cygwin1.dll based or MinGW+MSYS based).

But what if there is no ssh client installed on the system and you don’t have permission to install something on the box?

Well, mindterm comes to remedy. It can serves as java applets that you can download off from a website.

Say, you access a webpage which has the mindterm applet served (can be either in a popup mode or an embeded mode), with a java plugin enabled web browser, you can ssh into the box, without a ssh client program pre-existing on your local machine.

Notes:

1) mindterm is not open-sourced. The original version had source publically accessible though, but that version only supports ssh protocol version 1.

2) the ssh port, i.e., 22/tcp, still needs to be open on the server. You may access the applet on http port (80/tcp by default) , the applet itself still connects to the 22/tcp port from the client machine to the server. The port 22 is not tunnelled into the port 80 traffic. If you configure your ssh server to listen to a non-standard port, you need to change the mindterm settings accordingly.