Configuring and autostarting shellinabox

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Since many of the places I travel to have firewalls disallowing other than http and https traffic.

So I started researching shellinabox for openSuSE (I run 12.3), but there is remarkably little information https://www.google.com/search?q=shellinabox+opensuse
The first link (on my end) even talks about downloading the source, then compile and install it in /etc/init.d/boot.local: http://www.linuxintro.org/wiki/Shell_in_a_box

I found out that zypper knows about shellinabox, so this succeeded:

zypper install shellinabox

Now my plan is this:

  • run shellinabox in non-secure mode locally
  • have apache handle the https to http

So, here I am trying to get this done without relying on yast, as I want to know how to configure this on the console.

This gives a whole bunch of questions, starting with these:

  • is chkconfig the right command to configure shellinabox to run as a service and start after boot? It seems to indicate that currently it is not configured as such, but apache is:
**snip:/home/jeroenp #** chkconfig shellinabox
shellinabox  off
**snip:/home/jeroenp #** chkconfig apache2
apache2  on

rcshellinabox start will start the service at port 4200, as nmap shows nicely:

**snip:/etc/shellinabox/certs #** nmap -sV -p 4200 localhost


Starting Nmap 6.25 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-05-31 22:14 CEST
Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.000091s latency).
PORT     STATE SERVICE VERSION
4200/tcp open  http    ShellInABox httpd


Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at http://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 11.31 seconds
  • what is the configuration file to tell shellinabox the local port number, usage of HTTPS and such? There seem to be none generated in /etc

Right now these directories are empty:

/etc/shellinabox
/etc/shellinabox/certs

The thing is however that http://localhost:4200 is automagically redirected to https://localhost:4200/ (which I don’t want, as I want apache2 to do the https handling for me so I can share port 443 with other https traffic).

More questions will obviously follow (:

–jeroen

2

I don’t see how shellinabox can address the problem you want to solve (traffic restricted to http and https).

Remote services will always require connecting to the service on a specified port, you <must> have access to that port unless you have a proxy on the Internet which can accept traffic over port 80 or 443 and then applies rules to create a new session to the destination on the expected and required port.

Or, use a VPN over a permitted port which can encapsulate your session accessing the service using a port normally blocked.

TSU