[olug] web-based administration

[William E. Kempf]

Christopher Cashell said:
> At Tue, 05 Nov 02, Unidentified Flying Banana Brian Wiese, said:
>> http://www.appgate.com/products/mindterm/mindterm_pricing.php
>>
>> at $7,000 a pop, i dont think so. but thanks for the info.  I'll
>> probably stumble upon what I'm looking for sometime in the future.
>> thanks.

This talk peaked my interest.  Being able to SSH into my box from a Java
applet would mean I'd have access from nearly anywhere with out having to
install anything on a machine.  I agree, however, that $7,000 a pop is
simply not worth the money for personal use.

> This is actually a fairly recent change.
>
> MindTerm was initially a GPLed product, and continued that way for a
> little over three years.  Around the time that support for SSH2 was
> added, the people behind MindTerm started going more and more
> commercial (changing from MindBright to AppGate), and when MindTerm 2.0
> was released, it was released as a purely commercial product, with no
> source code included.
>
> However, on the positive side, another company, ISNetworks, has
> (somewhat) continued development of MindTerm 1.2.1 (the last GPLed
> version), making a few enhancements and updates.  You can find their
> version at http://www.isnetworks.com/ssh/.  You can also find stock
> releases of MindTerm 1.2.1 floating around on the web and ftp sites, or
> if you're running Debian, 'apt-get install mindterm'.

So, I checked this out.  Couldn't quite figure out how to get it set up
and running, though I spent less than 2 minutes on it.  I was turned away
by the fact that this is simply a project no longer in development. 
Basically, you can't even expect bug fixes, AFAICT.  So, I searched the
web for alternatives.  Found one at http://javassh.org.  Didn't take too
much to get this one up and running, and it appears to work fairly nicely.
 I believe it's SSH1 only, but they are working on SSH2 support.  Not sure
exactly how secure this is (for instance, what keys does it use for
encryption?).  They did mention that this (or any other applet based
solution) is vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.  But for my
purposes, I think it's probably secure enough, and the ability to access
my machine from anywhere out weighs the security risks.

Just thought others might be interested in the link to this alternative
SSH applet that's actually under active development.

-- 
William E. Kempf