web-console is wrongly advertised as "Web-based SSH"

[jonmz]

This is more a documentation bug report as a bug itself.

I'd highly appreciate if you could stop offering web-console as a tool for "Web-based SSH", for the simple reason that it doesn't have anything to do with the SSH protocol, and while "SSH" stands for "secure shell", web-console isn't offering a shell at all. I already know that you address a little bit about this topic in your FAQ, however the basic tagline of your tool is still simply wrong.

This is obviously quite confusing for a lot of your users that expect scrolling output, want to login using public keys, expect a working terminal, want to change their environment or use interactive tools, to name just a few examples.

I'm not saying web-console isn't useful; advertising it as "Web-based SSH" however is blatantly wrong and triggers a whole bunch of wrongful expectations, and while it simulates being a shell, it behaves absolutely counter-intuitive compared to any real shell. Look at this trivial example where I want to modify an environment variable:

login: jonas
password: *****
You are authenticated
user@[...] ~$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin
user@[...] ~$ export PATH=/here/is/another/path:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin
user@[...] ~$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin

I won't call this a bug because I already understand that web-console is basically firing one-shots which run each in their own shell, with no sense of a persistent "environment". But this is what people are expecting if you promise them "SSH".

Please stop advertising web-console in this way.

[ghost]

^ thanks, saved me from faffing around installing it.

[majid4466]

I couldn't get shellinabox working on my machine, so I looked for alternatives and tried this ... to be disappointed again.

[filips123]

Another solution for this: Add support for those things. 😃