SSHTerm Applet

Description

The SSHTerm Applet is designed for environments where ease of access to SSH connectivity applications is crucial. The applet is accessible through a standard web browser and requires no physical installation on the host machine. This is useful for cases where you have perhaps borrowed a computer without SSH software installed, you simply point your web browser at a page containing an embedded SSHTerm applet - the terminal starts after a brief delay and you can be connecting over SSH seconds later!

To install the applet simply extract the distribution zip file onto your web server. The applet HTML file is pre-configured so you can test the applet by launching the sshterm-applet.html file in your browser. If you are deploying to environments where clients use JRE 1.4 exclusively you can remove the reference to SSHTermApplet-jdk1.3.1-dependencies-signed.jar from the APPLET tag and remove this file from the web server to avoid any additional overhead in downloading this un required dependency.

SSHTerm can be configured through a series of parameters which can be tailored to your own company's connectivity requirements. For example you may want the terminal to connect automatically to a certain server when the page loads. This helps to reduce the learning curve associated with the application and can be great for those users who are less familiar with connectivity applications.

For systems administrators who wish to customize the functionality of the terminal, we have listed these and their relevant functions below.

Parameters

Attribute Description
sshapps.connection.url The URL of a connection profile to open. Connection profiles are XML files which specify connection parameters and these may be created by setting up a connection through the standard SSHTerm application.
sshapps.connection.host The host to connect to (e.g "ssh.mycompany.com")
sshapps.connection.userName The username to connect as (e.g. "root")
sshapps.connection.authenticationMethod The authentication method to use when connecting. (e.g password, publickey)
sshapps.connection.connectImmediately Connect immediately to the specified host upon startup. (e.g "true" or "false")
sshapps.connection.showConnectionDialog Show the connection dialog (e.g "true" or "false")
sshapps.connection.disableHostKeyVerification Disables host key verification checking. This means that clients will not attempt to check the authenticity of the server. (e.g "true" or "false")
sshterm.ui.scrollBar Enables/disables the SSHTerm menubar (e.g "true" or "false")
sshterm.ui.autoHide Enable / disable auto-hiding of the toolbar, menu bar, status bar and scroll bar.


Embedding the applet into a web page

To embed the applet into a web page, use code similar to the following. This example creates a small terminal window of 640 x 480 pixels in size, and connects to the host "ssh.mycompany.com" immediately when loaded. The username parameter has also been set to default to "root".
<applet width="640" height="480"
archive="SSHTermApplet-signed.jar,SSHTermApplet-jdk1.4-workaround-signed.jar"
code="com.sshtools.sshterm.SshTermApplet"
codebase="." style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1; padding-left:
4; padding-right: 4; padding-top: 1; padding-bottom: 1">
<param name="sshapps.connection.host" value="ssh.mycompany.com">
<param name="sshapps.connection.userName" value="root">
<param name="sshapps.connection.connectImmediately" value="true">
<param name="sshapps.connection.authenticationMethod" value="password">
</applet>