shell based chat between users and servers

S

Spook

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During the installation of DA on one of my VM a broadcast with wall popped up.. That was all it took.. I scrambled to figure out what did that and replied with my greeting using wall. Since that moment I am unable to get the memories of all the telephone system abuse, bbs, fidonet, 2600 and so forth out of my head.

So far I've been fiddling around with the basics, echo redirection, wall, talk, write & mesg.

yTalk and nTalk are next on the list. Many providers blanket policy with NO IRC daemon and I suppose it's valid in many contexts. However I am just thinking of use between users on the servers, and between the servers.. For admin and reseller users to start.

Possibly later a means to be in shell and chat with a hosting client through their DA panel.

Self contained, low impact and no/low requirements are what I'm looking for. I get aggravated having to mess around with my browser, firewalls, plug-ins and such for third-party subscription types chat services.

Anyhow, I wanted to ask if anyone has been down this road yet and if there may be any input?

So far it looks quite workable and I'm kind of excited to begin working on this in the next month or two.
 
I'm not sure I see a question here.

Are you asking if we want this kind of feature? I don't. In fact I don't want any of my users to have shell access. It just opens up lots of new sources to worry about system hacking. I'm ot sure why any of this would need to be through the shell. There are lots of available packagtes you can use to allow chat between you and clients, and your resellers can set them up as well if they need to chat with their clients.

But more and more I see lots of sites with abandoned chat oftware (never says 'online'), so I'm not sure there's much need for that either.

Is this something you want to build? Or is this a feature request?

Any comments anyone?

Jeff
 
It is quite possible my first post is difficult to follow.. Then any post I make could be, since my particular type of articulation is perhaps unusual. Additionally, when I am talking of a topic which I am not well versed with, my writing can become worse I suppose.

The potential needs / uses & parameters I was thinking about..

+ self contained & managed, private
= no 3rd party services like livechat, skype, etc

+ admin <-> admin chat - same server & between owned servers while in shell
= take for instance this openssl bug. a trusted admin on server x could confer with admin on server y regarding & during a mass effort such as this heartbleed problem.

+ admin <-> user chat - admin
= a hosting client is down, admin working in shell to find problem. client in DA panel with pug-in (?) which facilitates exchange of messages between the two. shell account for user side / da from a pool of limited access, jailed (?) shell accounts expressly for the use of relay of 'talk' between shell and client in DA panel.

Those are two examples I expect are situations can be related to. Presently I do not know the technical details enough to form options or credibility of such an objective.

Jeff, no - wasn't a request for someone to do this. I was simply fishing for info if anyone has ever done this or if there is something already available that my ignorance has kept me from knowing.

When time permits, and depending on responses (EG: been done, exists) I intend to pursue this idea and make a project.

btw: I guess the subject isn't fully suitable for the actual idea. However since the idea spawned from shell based chat and could be useful in a situation like the example above.. don't know. Too early to worry about the subject.
 
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Was just contemplating on a chat, though not a shell-chat, maybe it can be used for something. I would build a KVM solely for this purpose, for better isolation and control. Don't really wanna mess with my DA in production for this purpose, trying to keep it secure. It's an interesting concept though, to be able to make a twitter-like micro chat. Need to read more about it. Maybe it can be used in a shell don't know, or in lynx?

http://www.unixmen.com/setup-your-own-twitter-like-website-using-statusnet/

http://status.net/wiki/UserDocs

/FAF
 
I've been experimenting with node.js (for an unrelated task) and seems like node might be a perfect fit and completely circumvent the security / shell related matters.
 
Spook said:
I've been experimenting with node.js (for an unrelated task) and seems like node might be a perfect fit and completely circumvent the security / shell related matters.
Click to expand...

Like writing a terminal emulator in node.js? - so that the browser can be used as an interactive terminal?

This guy wrote a module for node.js which maybe can help with that: https://github.com/chjj/pty.js/

It's unfortunately beyond my experience. Good luck with the project.
 
Besides, maybe OT or unrelated but SPICE seems nice. Do you know SPICE?

http://www.spice-space.org/features.html

I'm currently in the process of updating my virt-server to include SPICE for VM administration, or at least I'm planning too. Don't know if it can be used for other purposes, but the features are impressive and the "Future Features" looks promising. Don't really know anything about SPICE until recently, just reading about it. I will have to test and try it out and of-course read allot. Maybe you can use it for something? Don't know really, since this is for administrating VMs :) - just a thought.
 
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There is no reason for any users to ever have ssh access.
 
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