One gotty(1) Web terminal per user | Hacker News Reader

One gotty(1) Web terminal per user

jpmens.net

31 pointstodsacerdoti6 comments

It is not clear to me what was the problem they wanted to solve?

It talks about how they got tired of having to swap sharing different windows in Zoom. But instead of sharing their whole screen they did... something complicated.

And then they never return to the original zoom sharing problem, so it's not clear how it solved that problem? But then there is a new problem. They are setting up training machines... where the users can ssh in for some reason? Unclear really. They just need one gotty per user, that's all they tell us.

Probably it was a great hack, and all the power to them, but as a blogpost it is very hard to follow their thread. Would benefit from a bit more polish and editing.

> It talks about how they got tired of having to swap sharing different windows in Zoom. But instead of sharing their whole screen they did... something complicated.

And then one person shares their whole 34" 1440p ultrawide and everyone has a bad time. Also, selectively sharing individual windows is pretty effective at preventing accidental leaks of info that shouldn't be shared.

I run a similar thing [0] using GoTTY, but just switch user IDs after the GoTTY connection starts -- this way I don't have to use multiple ports.

[0] https://rkeene.dev/js-repl/?arg=bash

Interesting. Do you have any blog that describes how you set the whole thing up? (ie, more details than your comment)

Hmm... Not a combined description of fitting the pieces together. There wasn't anything too special about making it work except for writing a small security shim [0] that changes UID and drop privileges (which lots of people just use firejail for -- but I wanted a bit more control over which system calls are permitted). The rest is really similar to this story's blog post, running GoTTY and setting up a webserver to pass stuff to it (I use Apache, so the exact configuration differs, but that's just trivia).

I did write a blog post about part of that shim [1], which I use for a bunch of different things ([2] being the most recent).

[0] https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/play-tcl-lang-o... [1] https://dev.to/rkeene/a-dsl-for-seccomp-rules-nk0 [2] https://tcl.rkeene.org/

Article points to the original which has been forked and is being updated via https://github.com/sorenisanerd/gotty

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