[Techtalk] Using a web browser to control stuff locally -eek!

[Jenn Vesperman]

On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 16:07, esme wrote:
> On Saturday 20 Aug 2005 03:26, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 12:24:52AM +0100, esme wrote:
> > > How do you invoke a shell command from a web page?
> 
> I've just looked up what CGI means.  Damn! All I had to do on the Amiga was 
> create an ML page which I could either create to point at contents on the 
> Amiga itself, or include with multimedia files and players on the same floppy 
> disk as the ML file itself... my friend inserts floppy in their Amiga, opens 
> up the ML file in their browser, and voila! They have a hypertext document 
> that includes multimedia stuff that can be invoked simply by clicking on a 
> button.  Or, friend comes along and uses my PC, clicks on desktop icon and 
> gets a ML page that does the same thing playing stuff off my Amigas hard 
> drive. 
> 
> It was pretty damned easy to do on the Amiga once you'd learnt the markup 
> language.  Isn't it so easy using Linux, then?  (I do realise that I'd need 
> to consider permissions, but that's OK - I understand those. Oh, and no, I am 
> NOT wanting folk out on the internet to be able to play stuff off of my 
> machine  - just people either sat at my computer or on the LAN it's (going to 
> be) connected to).

It's not a Linux issue, it's that you're trying to use the wrong tool
for the job.

Web browsers/Web servers/HTTP/HTML is designed to allow the server to
host a limited, specific set of data (aka Web pages) which can be viewed
over the internet by any client (aka browser), in a secure manner. They
specifically do NOT allow the client to run arbitrary commands (eg shell
escape) on the server, because that would be a hellacious security hole.

I'm not sure of a specific tool to do what you're after, but I _do_ know
that the reason it looks difficult to do as a web-browser thing is
because you're trying to hammer a nail, but what you have in your hand
is a monkey wrench, not a hammer. :)

I'm pretty sure that by now, someone's pointed you in the direction of
the tool you need.


Jenn V.
-- 
    "Do you ever wonder if there's a whole section of geek culture 
        	you miss out on by being a geek?" - Dancer.
   My book 'Essential CVS': published by O'Reilly in June 2003.
jenn at anthill.echidna.id.au     http://anthill.echidna.id.au/~jenn/