Connect to another terminal session

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Chris Corbyn
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Connect to another terminal session

Post by Chris Corbyn »

Out of pure curiosity because it looked cool....

Saw someone at work, take remote control of someone's linux terminal session and start typing while the user watched. I'm not talking about VNC, or remote desktop, I know how to do that. It was purely command line, and whatever they did on the remote terminal was also happening on the local one.

Is this making any sense? If it is.... what is it and how do you do it?

Example:

I'm Joe... I log on to my networked linux machine called "Foo", open a console, start typing commands.

Network administrator calls me, wants to connect to my machine to fix something.

Network admin uses SSH to connect to foo and starts working, behind the scenes.

I ask if I can see what he's doing so he connects directly to the console I'm currently working in.

Wow... my hands aren't on the keyboard but someone's typing text in my console and I can follow it exactly.
timvw
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Post by timvw »

if the user uses screen, it's pretty easy to take that over ;)

basically, a user get's to see what is in/out of /dev/stdX.. So, as root, you can open that "file" and read/write into it ;)
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Chris Corbyn
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Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2004 7:57 am
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Post by Chris Corbyn »

Thanks... I checked that out but it's not what I was thinking of...

I asked on the Gentoo forums and it turns out this is what I witnessed.....

http://www.linuxhelp.ca/guides/ttysnoop/

ttysnoop -- pretty cool :)
timvw
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Post by timvw »

It was a typo of me... I meant /dev/ttyX. But hey, i'm glad you found it already :)
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