How to open a telnet/ssh session in browsers on Windows 7?

Question

I am creating a webpage which contains a lot of links to various devices and IP addresses. The requirement is such that when you click on any of the links in the webpage, it should open a telnet/ssh session to that device. I am able to do some registry changes and make the session open in a separate client like putty. But is there a way to open the session directly in the browser itself?

Thanks, Guna

Answer 1

You could host a client server side, e.g. using Anyterm or Ajaxterm.

Answer 2

Theoretically it's possible to implement an SSH client directly in JavaScript. Something like PuTTY but running directly in your browser. Unfortunately I've personally not seen such a tool and it would likely be quite slow (doing all SSH encryption within JavaScript).

I know some related projects which usually go a slightly different way. They use a JavaScript/AJAX based client in your browser to connect to a terminal proxy server:

• WebShell
• Ajaxterm
• Anyterm

Alternatively you might be able to register specific protocol handlers on your systems which allow you to launch an existing terminal emulator like PuTTY. See this site for some information on how to do this with Firefox.

After registering a protocol (e.g. console://) then you should be able to just insert links like console://192.168.1.1 in your HTML documents in order to allow clients with properly registered console:// protocol handler to connect by launching the local PuTTY terminal emulator with correct parameters.