Telnet from within PHP page

Anon

Here's what I am trying to do :-

I have a machine runnig php that has connections to the internet and to an internal network. I want to have a page on that computer that will allow me to either ping an internal host or telnet to it. I know how to do the ping part -

$x=`ping 1.2.3.4'

But is there a way I can start a telnet session off the web server - so I can interract with it and then quit. I tried putting <a href="telnet://1.2.3.4">telnet</a>
onto page but when I click that I try and telnet from the client accessing the server not the server that has access to the internal hosts.

If I do $x=telnet 1.2.3.4 $x holds the connected string but I cannot interract with the session.

Any help most appreciated.

Peter

Anon

The telnet portion that you are trying to do requires a little bit more than linking. I'm not sure of the syntax but you'll have to dig into PHP and see if it has a networking API.

Essentially you will probably need to simulate the telnet session rather than firing up the session using a hyperlink. For example in perl you can do the following to fire up the ftp

use Net::FTP;

my $cur_ftp = Net::FTP->new();
$cur_ftp->login($host, $user, $password) or die ("cannot connect: $host: $!");
$cur_ftp->put($file_to_put);
$cur_ftp->quit();

and then your web page can initiate to execute this process in the background. So based on your example, you can do the following

write the telnet program in perl or C or Java or if you're on a UNIX system use the r* commands especially rsh. These are very powerful especially if you have an account on the machine.

rsh -l someuser somehost run_this_command.cgi

executes run_this_command.cgi on somehost as long as someuser has privilege to somehost.

run the page under SSL and password protect it to prevent unauthorized access.

hope that helps

jan-mike ^_

dannys

You can use PHP\'s socket functions. I\'ve just used them to create a POP3 client, i\'d imagine it would fairly easy to create a telnet client too.