Hello everyone,
I am trying to develop a plugin to connect to a headless linux server through SSH which opens then in a new window. I can already connect to the server through SSH2, but is there any possibility to also open an interactive terminal? For example like you do in PuTTY.
Thanks in advance!
You've posted in what appears to be the right forum ... developers ... but ... wonder if you are kinda re-inventing the wheel. While there is no publically available moodle plugin that does an ssh shell, many hosting providers do offer such via cPanel/Terminal. If hosted on Google, Google's panel does allow configuration of something it calls OSLogin which is terminal/ssh into the hosted guest OS (Linux) environment.
If you do continue, a suggestion ... don't program it for the default ssh port 22, but rather, an unassigned port in the range 49152 to 65535 ... that for security purposes and getting away from script kiddie's that will hammer away at server. Since many hosting providers are moving to metered each one of those hits (valid or not/errored or not) are counted as traffic thus pushing your bill for hosting higher than it should be.
That assumes you install script not running as root/superuser can set up a port in the OS to be allowed ... inbound/outbound ... which, I doubt it could. :|
My 2 cents as a non-programmer, however!
'SoS', Ken
Not trying to burst bubbles or discourage since you say this is a project at a Uni, but ...
".... the goal is that for example students can click on a link in a course and then a new window pops up where you can see the shell."
As a former K12 server admin person, have to ask: what are students supposed to learn with shell access? Surely these student accounts will not be members of sudoers, will they?
Also have to ask ... have you ever had experience at administering a system for multiple users with shell access (just ssh - no web shell)?
There is a Virtual Programming Lab moodle plugin
https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_vpl
'SoS', Ken
+1 Marcus ... true story follows ...
A liberally minded tech director of a small school whose students were generally well behaved (offline and on), setup a Linux server to allow students to learn how to do web pages. Students had their own home directory and a public_html directory for publishing their DreamWeaver/other web creations.
Within a month of helping set that up, server out of space ... why? One student was really interested in cars ... all makes, models, years, etc. Spent a lot of time but managed to find the 'mother loads' of car pics ... ford, chevy, etc, and downloaded them to that server. Nothing really malicious ... just resulted in an un-intended consequence of no quota's (duh!).
Now as to a script for ssh and moodle ... best, me thinks, if it could be restricted to the admin/server folks. Advantage in admin of a moodle then ... git acquired code, git maintained moodle + ability to make site backups + take advantage of the cli scripts that do exist in moodle code.
Anyhoo, my 2 cents!
'SoS', Ken
