GateOne, more than a web-based SSH

by Emile `iMil' Heitor - 2013-01-26

I’ve been searching for a Web-based SSH for quite a while, and I recently read about GateOne on the dedicated Wikipedia page. Not only GateOne does what I was searching for, but it also comes up with nice features like interpreting images on-the-fly.

The remote server on which I intended to run this software is, of course, a NetBSD 6.0 domU, and as I anticipated, some work was needed in order to make GateOne work on this platform.

The software needs the following dependencies:

  • textproc/py-html5lib
  • devel/py-readline
  • graphics/py-imaging
  • misc/dtach
  • www/py-tornado The latter was not available in pkgsrc, so I created the package and commited it to pkgsrc-current. The package is straightforward:

Back to GateOne, while this software is really handy, it has not been made very “packageable”, meaning that it expects everything to be located on the same directory, i.e. ${PREFIX}/gateone. Not being brave enough to dig into the implications of such choice within the code, I have not made a public package of it, instead I created a local-package that suits my needs. Why not simply use the bundled setup.py? Because every .py file begins with:

this had to be changed to pkgsrc’s default python PATH, and using pkgsrc’s REPLACE_PYTHON command was easier than a find / sed / whatever oneliner.

Here’s the local package I created in pkgsrc/localpkg, which is owned by my user for convenience:

At some point I may write a real package out of this, but I wanted to play with that shiny client quickly :)

Once installed, you’ll end up with a ${BASEDIR}/gateone directory, which you may want to chown -R youruser for convenience.

I rapidly got bitten by that reported bug https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne/issues/161, which actually was a bug in the software itself. Simply modify the file /usr/pkg/gateone/plugins/ssh/scripts/ssh_connect.py, line 402, from:

to

At this point, GateOne should run normally. If you are, as I do, to run the frontend with a non-privileged user, take care to change some values in the server.conf file:

Also, as I use a CAcert-enabled reverse proxy, I had no use of the SSL, so I set disable_ssl to True. Do not forget to update the origins variable accordingly.

There we go! I now have a shiny HTML5 Terminal Emulator, ready to accept my SSH connections wherever I am… and here’s the mandatory screenshot :)

GateOne 1.1