Development [LWN.net]

Anyterm: A Terminal Anywhere

Anyterm is a terminal emulator package that runs as a local Javascript application on a web browser, it is similar in concept to the commercial application MindTerm from the company appGATE. Anyterm uses SSL encryption to prevent snooping of terminal session information. The Comparisons page looks at the differences between Anyterm and several other remote login applications. The introduction describes Anyterm:

[Anyterm]

Anyterm is a box on a web page that behaves like a shell or other text-mode application on the host machine. Performance is quite respectable and it will run almost anywhere, even through firewalls, since it uses only HTTP on standard ports. It consists of:

    * Some Javascript on a web page.
    * An XmlHTTP channel to the web server.
    * An Apache module that receives the XmlHTTP requests and feeds them
      to an emulated terminal, and thence to a shell or whatever.

The how it works document sheds light on the internal operation of an Anyterm session and the deployment document describes a number of possible configuration arrangements. The documentation also addresses a number of potential security concerns when running Anyterm.

Anyterm stable version 1.0 and development version 1.1.0 were just announced: "This week the stable branch has reached the milestone of version 1.0, as I think that this is now good enough for widespread use. There's also a development branch where I'll be adding more experimental features, starting with WAP support in version 1.1.0 which was released today. So you can now get a shell prompt on your mobile phone. Some work is needed to make it useable though. Future plans include merging my QWAZERTY keyboard-layout mapping code."

Dependencies include version 2 of the Apache web server and the ROTE terminal emulation library. Anyterm development is Debian-based, your editor was able to get Anyterm to build on a Fedora Core 3 system by adding some file paths various lines of several include files. The installation instructions provided sufficient information for getting the software up and running.

The configuration instructions bring one issue to light: "If you're using a system with SE-Linux security features, such as Fedora Core 3, you may find that they prevent anygetty from invoking /bin/login. This probably just needs a slight change to a configuration file somewhere to make it work; if someone knows what is required please get in touch." A bit of SE-Linux configuration knowledge would be a useful addition to the documentation.

To get a look at Anyterm in action, you can try running the Tetris clone "bastet" from the Anyterm web site.

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