RXSH v1.0

1-What is RXSH ?

RXSH is Restricted SHell. The letter X was chosen arbitrarily only because there was already 'rsh' (remote shell).

2-What does it do?

Nothing. RXSH is simply totally dumb shell which does absolutely nothing. It takes no input, it'll print uninformative message though.

3-So.. why did you do it?

I wanted a shell that will be used to maintain a connection to the server, but that will not allow the user to do anything on the server. It's actually useful only if you don't want to run any service at your public ip address and use ssh forwarded ports instead.

For example, I have mysqld running on localhost (127.0.0.1) at the standard port (3306). I only wish to allow connection to this service to only those users who have a connection account on my server.

4-Where to get it?

http://tomi.panula-ont.to/software/rxsh/rxsh-1.0.tar.gz

5-How to compile?

gcc -o rxsh rxsh.c

6-How to install?

2 steps:

First: cp rxsh /usr/local/bin
Second: echo /usr/local/bin/rxsh >> /etc/shells

7-How to deploy?

chsh -s /usr/local/bin/rxsh username

8-How to take connection to <service> ?

$ ssh -L localport:localhost:remoteport username@hostname

Now, you only need to command your client software to take connection to localport at localhost.

9-I'm using putty on Windows. How to take connection to MySQL at some host?

c:\> start plink -L 3306:localhost:3306 username@hostname
c:\> mysql -h localhost -u mysqlusername --password=mysqlpassword databasename

10-Is there any support?

Yes, although I don't really know why would you need it, but please send me email if you use this software. You may send me an email at <tomi AT panula-ont DOT to>.

11-Any future plans?

Logging maybe.