minor suggestions for improvement

[terryschen]

Hi,

I got this working for my personal server. It is pretty darn useful. Kudos for putting this project together and making it open source.

The only minor hiccup was that I use a non-standard SSH port and I want to let the user choose the username (the script as-is forces the user to be the same user that started the node server).

So, I put together a simple perl script (sshuser.pl) that is called by app.js that looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $addr = $ARGV[0];

print "Enter your username: ";
my $username = <STDIN>;
chomp ( $username );
exec ("/usr/bin/ssh -p <non standard ssh port here> $username\@$addr");

Maybe you or other user may find it useful.

Terry

[krishnasrinivas]

Added options --sshuser and --sshport in the latest commit. Can you check if it works fine for you?

[terryschen]

Wow, fast response.

Hi, the sshport works. But the sshuser is not quite what I wanted. With the way the code works, I believe it is still hardcoded at startup. I would like to support different users after the server have started.

But thanks for the sshport commit!

Terry

[krishnasrinivas]

You don't want to run it as root? If you run app.js as root it will spawn /bin/login and it will let you choose username.

[terryschen]

I don't normally like to run webapps as root. Granted, this may just be paranoia on my part. Also, I may not always have root access. As an example, I am running this on a dev box and the administrator has only granted me the ability to run wetty via nginx port forwarding.

Anyway, running as root and using /bin/login does work...So, if this is too much trouble, please close the bug and I can continue to use the perl script I have pasted in earlier.

Thanks! Terry

[krishnasrinivas]

latest commit has the option to specify the username. I have updated the README can you check if it is clear? let me know if it works for you.