binford2k / abalone

A simple Sinatra & hterm based web terminal.

Hi there 👋

I’m just your average beer & coffee drinking software developer and sysadmin in PDX. When I told people I was moving here, nobody was surprised. This may have something to do with the toe shoes. I’m a Developer Advocate at Puppet, which basically means that I know how to talk to developers outside the company and to developers inside the company and I can help them to be friends with each other. I get to play with all the cool new tools and help others learn how to do it for real.

When I started here, I was in professional services, which meant that I visited exotic places like Denver and Columbus and teach people to use Puppet or help them integrate it into their infrastructure. Now most of my travel is to blab at conferences and such.

• 🔭📽🤔 My major project is puppetlabs/showoff, for which I'm always interested in collaboration and help with. I do have a bunch of other smaller projects going, some are pinned below and some can be found in my unholy mess of repositories. Someday I'll clean those up.
• 💻 I’ve been poking at Rust a bit lately, and want to rewrite binford2k/abalone in something closer to the metal.
• 🌎 Places on the interwebs where I sometimes put words
  • https://binford2k.com
  • https://goatops.com
  • https://www.wasitfreespeech.com
• 📫 I'm @binford2k in all the other places too.
• 😄 Pronouns: he/him or anything respectful
• 🛼 My partner is a founding member of a few roller derby leagues/teams and we're pretty active in that world. So if you've never seen a bout and you want to, hit me up!

abalone's Issues

add option to display /etc/issue*

Abalone should give you the option to display /etc/issue or /etc/issue.net before you log in.

ws.send({'data' => File.read('/etc/issue.net').encode(crlf_newline: true)}.to_json)
ws.send({'data' => "\r\n\r\n"}.to_json)

poll for running server

the "start session" overlay should maybe validate whether the server is running and offer a message if not.

Abalone starts with a fixed terminal size assumption

When Abalone starts, it has no insight into how big the terminal is, so it initializes at the standard terminal window size:

@writer.winsize = [24,80]

It would be nice to retrieve the size of the physical hterm viewport on the client and adjust to fit.

bannerfile => 'true' results passes string true to config.yaml

Setting the bannerfile parameter for the abalone class to true or 'true' results in the string 'true' being passed into the :bannerfile: parameter in the config.yaml instead of the expected default. Explicitly specifying a string works as expected.

vim hangs when running login on OS X host

Vim hangs on S+ busy wait during startup on OS X. Doesn't happen on Linux, and only happens when login is run, not bash/ssh/irb/anything else.

Add a login page message option

This would be a message that would be incorporated into the "start session" overlay.

watchdog is unreliable in some circumstances

Sticky sessions

Provide a way for sessions to persist when reloading a page or changing to another page.

starting the session fails silently when websockets are blocked

If a firewall or DPI between the user and the server alters the websocket packets (e.g., degrading them to standard HTTP) then the terminal just silently fails to load. In the js console you see unexpected 200 statuses. It's expecting a 101 Switching Protocols instead.

This indicates that a websocket connection was attempted, but the packets weren't valid, so the server responds with the standard HTML page. The WebSocket() call in js doesn't know how to respond to that and just fails.

Instead, we should detect that, or catch errors, and display an informative error message.