remote shell access on 90x,60x

[review]

In order to write and test some scripts I wanted a remote shell access on the device. Poterm is great but it takes quite some time to type in the commands. Additionally there is no pipe etc. which makes it a bit inconvenient for serious work.

So I wrote my own script which makes use of the tools ready available on the device in order to access from the PC the pocketbook. Since there seems to be a firewall running on the pocketbook needs to initiate the connection. Accordingly the script needs to know the IP address of the computer from which you want to connect from.

Yesterday I've uploaded the app in the german forum but thought that in the non-german community there might be an interest in this app as well.

Installation procedure:
1) unzip attached file
2) edit script and replace in the line "myip=192.168.0.101" the IP address with the one you want to connect from
3) copy the modified script onto the device

Running:
1) shutdown firewall of PC (or better open port 9999 of incoming connections)
2) run on PC in a terminal: nc -l 9999
3) execute the app rsh on the device.

Enjoy!

[paola]

Originally Posted by review

In order to write and test some scripts I wanted a remote shell access on the device. Poterm is great but it takes quite some time to type in the commands. Additionally there is no pipe etc. which makes it a bit inconvenient for serious work.

Hi review, this is obviously beyond me, but just to see whtehr there is any hope that I can folow what you ar doing: this software you have uploaded means that you can run a command line on your computer, which is executed on the Pocketbook?

[review]

Originally Posted by paolamanzini

Hi review, this is obviously beyond me, but just to see whtehr there is any hope that I can folow what you ar doing: this software you have uploaded means that you can run a command line on your computer, which is executed on the Pocketbook?

Exactly.

and since there is a busyboy (a linux version) on the pocketbook, many commands from the linux world will directly work. E.g. df will give you the space available of each partition. Or you can download files from the internet with just typing wget http://www.google.com When I develop scripts I always run them on a remote shell in order to see if there are some deviations on busybox compared to my PC linux.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by review

In order to write and test some scripts I wanted a remote shell access on the device. Poterm is great but it takes quite some time to type in the commands. Additionally there is no pipe etc. which makes it a bit inconvenient for serious work.

I like poterm, but am also annoyed by the lack of important unix shell characters in the keyboard. I may have to finally buy myself a wifi capable DSL router to take advantage of this.

[LoneTech]

Busybox is not a Linux version (Linux is only the kernel), but an implementation of many of the basic commands. It's usually used where we have little space, to replace coreutils, util-linux, fileutils and so on, most of which comes from GNU. To my knowledge, all e-ink devices run Linux, but the userspace may vary a bit.

The shortcomings of the poterm keyboard come from inkview, and I believe poterm is also pretty useless for screen oriented things like curses (less, vi, top etc). The keyboard is defined in a config file (language/keyboard/EN.kbd) which may contain multiple layouts (although I suspect it's a fixed size), so we can probably add in the missing characters.

Edit: Almost forgot, great job! And by the way, I don't think there's a firewall but busybox' version of nc (netcat) doesn't have listen mode. Somewhere there's a telnetd we can build for the pocketbook.

[paola]

guys, many thanks for the explanations - I'll sit heare at the window looking out for your instructions when you have some apps - so grateful there are people like you on this great forum

[MartinZ]

Hi review,

This rsh is very nice!

For the Windows guys:

You can use Chris Wysopal's Windows-portation of netcat (nc) to connect to your PocketBook:

http://pintday.org/downloads/netcat/nc11nt.zip

To use it:

-extract "nc11nt.zip" in a folder you like
-start the Windows-Commandline (cmd.exe) with "run as Administrator"
-type nc -l -p9999

Start rsh.app on your PB

now you can type in BusyBox-Commands

[reader42]

Originally Posted by LoneTech

Somewhere there's a telnetd we can build for the pocketbook.

More information about the telnetd can be found here.

[Hr.stein]

for windows 7 + cygwin:
nc -l -p 9999
in case you get a ERR: “local listen fuxored: INVAL”.

[Skeeve]

Originally Posted by review

In order to write and test some scripts I wanted a remote shell access on the device.

*WOW* Great stuff! Thanks a lot for this helpful script.