Remote terminal support (still work in progress)

Remote terminal on the device detail page

There’s a new exciting feature that might make device management easier if you want to quickly peek into what a device is doing. It’s now possible to drop into a shell on any of your devices right from the web dashboard. Have a look here:

It’s a real and full featured terminal, so you can run even interactive programs like top on your device. The feature is secure and uses the same type of HTTPS websocket connection that’s used for the existing device signaling/querying connection. This also isn’t using SSH and there’s no key management required whatsoever. It just works :slight_smile:

In the future, there might even be a command line tool, so you can get a full shell by invoking a new tool like this: ib-shell $DEVICE_ID. Stay tuned.

Nevermind: The tool is now available and works pretty well on my Ubuntu machine. You can fetch it from here: https://github.com/info-beamer/package-sdk/tree/master/ib-shell

Trying it out

You need the current testing version and right now the feature must be manually enabled. If you’re interested in trying it out, just write an email to hello@info-beamer.com and it’ll be enabled for you.

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Updated the documentation. Here’s how you can add this feature to your own admin UI: https://info-beamer.com/doc/api#devicesession

The implementation on info-beamer hosted uses https://xtermjs.org

This feature can be enabled by clicking [x] Feature: Show remote terminal on device page on the accounts page.

Would it be possible to add “root” access to this?

Added. There’s now a dropdown next to the connect button.

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