Monday, September 12th, 2005, 6:12 am
cPanel Terminal Hack
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When I first set up this site, which is administered using cPanel, I was blocked access to a terminal (AKA shell, console, command-line) and denied telnet/SSH access by the Web host. By default, most hosts do likewise, depriving site owners from excessive flexibility in hope that security will not be jeopardised and sites will rarely ‘break’. Nonethess, I found a terminal workaround, which I would like to share.
Run command as a cron job (widget/icon shown above). Have it scheduled to run a minute later with output to get sent by E-mail (default option) or saved to a file, e.g.
du -all >~/output_file
output_file, which gets created in your home directory, should then contain text that otherwise will have appeared in a terminal. Likewise, virtually anything including installations can be carried out. System administrators would become distressed if this practice became commonplace. In essence, this is the same as having a terminal-based interface, albeit it is slower and unresponsive.
Example cron job in cPanel – periodic mySQL backups (click image for full-sized equivalent)
October 12th, 2005 at 9:57 am
that’s a pretty cool trick!!