Ask HN: Web-based personal terminal options? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Web-based personal terminal options?

5 pointsjhow159 comments

I've just needed to ssh into a VPS to fix something pretty urgently but my laptop was on the fritz and held me up. Obviously a big single point of failure problem!

I don't have any other physical machines that I could give ssh key access as backup..

There must be a web-based personal terminal provider that you can set up on a permanent basis? Then you could access it from anywhere, even when out with mobile etc. But I'm not sure which to go with/trust.

Or do most people just have a cheap secondary laptop?

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I use android phone with termux or juicessh and hacker keyboard app. Also pretty much every phone should work with tiny foldable Bluetooth keyboard.

If you want a mobile kit for hotel room without carrying laptop there you can try some HDMI screen mirroring dongle (Google Cast).

There are a lot of potential security problems with setting something like what you describe, but it is very possible.

If you wanted, you could run https://github.com/huashengdun/webssh on the sever you are trying to access, or something equivalent to a Boston server. This is something you should definitely host with TLS, and some form of authentication.

You could use something like this: https://github.com/PHPAuth/PHPAuth You could also use Okta.

What are these security problems?

A good place to start looking would be https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Proje...

The steps I described would mitigate most of those.

I built my own, Using codemirror.

NodeJs for the server which spawns a process to execute bash commands.

https://twitter.com/fasturdotcom

I use my phone. I have termux on android, with password protected ssh-key and it did save me a few times.

I assume there is something like that for iOS, or other phones.

I use google cloud shell all the time and it works really well. It spins up an ephemeral container, but it persists the home directory.

What you described would be hideously insecure. Get a backup laptop.

Alright - thank you!

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