hterm - local shell access

[ddjo...@gmail.com]

I am new to Secure Shell.  I have used it to connect to various ssh hosts and it works great.  I'm embarrassed that I cannot find the answer to this basic question; but, it seems to be eluding me.

My understanding is that hterm is a separate component of Secure Shell and that  it is an xterm-compatible terminal. The FAQs talk about hterm competing with xterm.  I take all this to mean that I can somehow use hterm to get local shell access.  I have not been able to figure out exactly how to do that.  Am I missing the obvious?  Sorry; but, thanks for any input.

          ... doug 

[Aaron Fellin]

There used to be a way to do this on ChromeOS, but I don't think it still works.

If you're on a Linux host with an SSH daemon running, you could just SSH to localhost. It's not exactly a local shell, but it solves the same issue.

[ddjo...@gmail.com]

> There used to be a way to do this on ChromeOS,

> but I don't think it still works.

That's unfortunate.  That being the case, I don't see how we can think of hterm as being competition for xterm.  :-)

> If you're on a Linux host with an SSH daemon running,

> you could just SSH to localhost. It's not exactly a local shell,

> but it solves the same issue.

I thought about that.  If that's truly what has to be done; then, the issue becomes whether it's better to run SSH on the local host; or, add a window manager.  I was hopeful that I would be able to run google-chrome *AS* the window manager; but, not having shell access would be a show stopper. To my way of thinking, eliminating the window manager altogether would be a gigantic step forward.  However, if it comes at the expense of having to add an ssh daemon, I'm not sure that the gain is all that significant.

Thanks for the input.

          ... doug

[Krishna Srinivas]

Running sshd is very light weight! And you can setup ssh keys for a
passwordless login.
If you really want to have direct local tty access to the hterm you
will have to write an npapi plugin which will deal with the
openpty/forkpty calls.

Krishna

[Robert Ginda]

On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 5:38 PM, <ddjo...@gmail.com> wrote:

> There used to be a way to do this on ChromeOS,

> but I don't think it still works.

That's unfortunate.  That being the case, I don't see how we can think of hterm as being competition for xterm.  :-)

xterm, gnome-terminal, Konsole, Terminal.app, iTerminal are all examples of native applications that have the ability to execute other native apps.  Typically they start a shell environment such as bash by default, but the shell in not actually part of the terminal emulator.

The hterm documentation compares hterm's performance and correctness to that of xterm, since xterm is a bit of a de-facto gold standard for terminal emulators (IMHO, at least.)

Secure Shell is an app that happens to use hterm, and is "hard wired" to run only the shh command.  It's as if you aliased "xterm" to "xterm ssh" (and added some connection management UI the ssh command.)

> If you're on a Linux host with an SSH daemon running,

> you could just SSH to localhost. It's not exactly a local shell,

> but it solves the same issue.

I thought about that.  If that's truly what has to be done; then, the issue becomes whether it's better to run SSH on the local host; or, add a window manager.  I was hopeful that I would be able to run google-chrome *AS* the window manager; but, not having shell access would be a show stopper. To my way of thinking, eliminating the window manager altogether would be a gigantic step forward.  However, if it comes at the expense of having to add an ssh daemon, I'm not sure that the gain is all that significant.

On Chrome OS, Ctrl-Alt-T brings up an hterm-based local terminal that only allows a subset of commands.  If you turn on Chrome OS developer mode, then one of the allowed commands is "shell", which starts a local bash session.

On other operating systems there is no Chrome app that launches a local shell.  You could probably build one using hterm and the recently introduced Native Messaging API to create one.

Rob.

[Doug Jolley]

At least I am now clear on how things work WRT this issue.  Thanks for all the input.

I can probably live with running sshd although it is a bit unsettling for me.

In the FAQs, I notice that there is the following question:

> But, what if I *want* to ssh over HTTP?

I'm wondering if the answer to that question (which is a bit beyond me) would be helpful in solving my problem since I am already running a web server (lighttpd) on the localhost. IOW, would that help me avoid having to run sshd?

Thanks again for all the input.

... doug

On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 5:38 PM, <ddjo...@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Follow me on Twitter (@ddjolley).

[Robert Ginda]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 7:15 PM, Doug Jolley <ddjo...@gmail.com> wrote:

At least I am now clear on how things work WRT this issue.  Thanks for all the input.

I can probably live with running sshd although it is a bit unsettling for me.

In the FAQs, I notice that there is the following question:

> But, what if I *want* to ssh over HTTP?

I'm wondering if the answer to that question (which is a bit beyond me) would be helpful in solving my problem since I am already running a web server (lighttpd) on the localhost. IOW, would that help me avoid having to run sshd?

Nope.  You'd need sshd *and* a websocket-to-TCP-socket relay.