Best Terminal Emulation for HP-UX?

[Ron Irving]

My 'thing' these days is Attachmate Reflections. It has most of the bells and whistles for my tired old brain.

[OldSchool]

a) dtterm is the standard terminal client used w/ CDE on HP. It does have a scrollbar and it does work. You X terminal emulation package has nothing to do with you having a scroll bar on your terminal or not.

b) detailed log file of all commands? By day? Good luck.....

c) Auto Rlogin & auto su to root? the security auditors are going to love this one... If you tried that here, you would be pounding the pavement in search of other employment

d) "wrapping properly"....that's not "a feature of X-Windows" nor any terminal emulation software I'm aware of. If the environment (TERM, LINES and COLUMNS) is set properly, then the text should wrap properly....

e) I've used Century TinyTerm (Wyse60/vt220 emulation), Reflection-X and Exceed without any of the "issues" you noted (except for logging and login/su). I've also used PuTTY both as a terminal and tunnelling X-Windows w/o problems.

[Bill Hassell]

> 1) Notice that the text does not wrap like it should. I'm using HP3440s and HP-UX v11.11. I've chosen SSH2.

That's easy. Somewhere in your profiles (/etc/profile, $HOME/.profile, possibly .kshrc or .bash-stuff) you have hard coded TERM, LINES and COLUMNS. QCTerm is not compatible with TERM=vt100 or any other dumb terminal incantations. Unlike a vt100, QCTerm can change the character space (ie, lines and columns) and HP-UX will be notified automatically using a telnet subcode. Override all this automated stuff and nothing will look right on the screenm especially SAM and swinstall.

HP-UX has the ability to properly set all these items correctly based on your current screen. It is called ttytype and you can see it working with:

ttytype -s

To get it to setup all your user terminals correctly, rip out any code in /etc/profile that looks like this:



-------------------------
# set term if it's not set

if [ "$TERM" = "" -o "$TERM" = "unknown" -o "$TERM" = "dialup" \
-o "$TERM" = "network" ]
then
eval `ttytype -s -a`
fi

export TERM

# set erase to ^H, if ERASE is not set
if [ "$ERASE" = "" ]
then
ERASE="^H"
export ERASE
fi
stty erase $ERASE

----------------

and replace it with this:

eval $(ttytype -sa)

That's all there is to it. The archaic code in the default profile assumes that all incoming logins are from HP-UX systems or from PCs running software that properly identifies the terminal characteristics. This is seldom the case so always run ttytype at login. Also remove anything in your profiles where TERM=something is coded.

> 2) While this looks more promising and has a scrollbar, I still need to automate a regular login with SU to root so that I can quickly click the icon for a particular machine and get in quickly. Is there any way to automate that for a single click operation?

AS mentioned, this is an auditor's greatest dream -- a massive security risk where a user can login to any account (including root) without authentication. There's no reason to keep the root password secret -- just walk over to your desk at 2am in the morning and click the icons.

Now that said, assuming that your PC is locked down and properly secured (a laptop is a much bigger problem) then you can setup ssh2 connections with QCTerm. Create a public key with QCTerm, then add that key to your $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys file. Now you can login automatically. I would also discourage the use of su for root -- period. You WILL make a mistake and not know what happened. Download sudo from the HP software.hp.com site and use sudo to limit (and document) the damage).

[Bill Hassell]

Oh, I forgot, the QCTerm manual tells you how to login automatically:

http://www.aics-research.com/qcterm/manual.html#Autolaunch

And logging can be enabled both from the keyboard as well as via escape sequences from a script:

Look for "log" in the escape sequence pages:

http://www.aics-research.com/qcterm/escape.html

[Bob E Campbell]

I understand the desire to have a true logging terminal emulator, but I think the best solution might come in two parts.

Others could tell you if any of the console loggers would work in this case. If your needs are less stringent I would use a combination of Putty and history files:

export HISTFILE=${HISTDIR}/$(date +"hist_%Y%m%d")

This has all the limitations of history files, but is pretty cheap. You can run with this to have TTY-specific, instance-specific....

[rightbrain]

Bill,
Thanks for the response. I changed the lines in QCTerm to 120 and that seems to have resolved it somewhat, though now the screen is a little wider than I like it. That's unimportant though at this stage as I have run into another snag with it.

When I do a swinstall to bring up a graphicalUI, it wants to give me the text version which is unacceptable. Any ideas?

Can you supply some examples of the following:

PROTOCAL: I guess ssh, ssh2, telnet, rlogin are protocals (yes?)

CONNECTION TYPE: Synonymous with Protocal ?

XWINDOWS: Would that be the same as XtermR6? I am very new to terminal sessions?

[Bill Hassell]

> Thanks for the response. I changed the lines in QCTerm to 120 and that seems to have resolved it somewhat, though now the screen is a little wider than I like it. That's unimportant though at this stage as I have run into another snag with it.

The width of the3 screen is a function of the font you are using. Just press CTRL+f1 or CTRL+f2 to change the font (and therefore, screen size. The menu across the top is a wealth of features.

> When I do a swinstall to bring up a graphicalUI, it wants to give me the text version which is unacceptable. Any ideas?

Most sysadmins find the character version much easier to use but I prefer the command line -- I seldom browse thins with swinstall. But a terminal emulator is emulating a terminal. You see these in museums sometimes -- they look like a portable TV with a keyboard and no mouse.

swinstall runs in 3 different modes: command line, terminal user interface (TUI) and (gulp) graphical user interface (GUI). If you want colors and mouse buttons, you have to run a different program, specifically Exceed or similar Xwindow emulator. Xwindows is specifically designed for colors and objects and pictures and similar features. swinstall is a character-based program so the GUI just look like the TUI. Check out the command line mechanism -- 10x-20x faster than TUI or GUI.

> Can you supply some examples of the following:
>
>PROTOCAL: I guess ssh, ssh2, telnet, rlogin are protocals (yes?)

protocols are communication standards. telnet is the classic Unix communication method but not favored because of security (all keystrokes can be seen and copied from the network). rlogin and it's relatives, rexec, rcp and remsh (rsh in other Unix flavors) are also communication protocols but much worse in the area of security. Secure Shell (ssh, scp, sftp) is the protocol of choice for today's computers.

> CONNECTION TYPE: Synonymous with Protocal ?

Connection can mean many things. A "real" terminal would use a serial cable, also known as the RS-232c communication standard. Another connection might be defined as a modem, also a serial connection method. The more common connections are made with local area networks (LAN) today.

> XWINDOWS: Would that be the same as XtermR6? I am very new to terminal sessions?

Xwindows is the oldest graphical interface and is variously called X11, Xwindows, X, etc. XtermR6 is a made-up term that abbreviates Xterminal and the X11 revision (6).

Here's the grandfather of all terminals, the vt100:

www.vt100.net

[rightbrain]

Excellent... OK so to get the full GUI of swinstall then I would need to to use an Xwindows interface. Anything Xwindows (free) that will be geared for HP and give me some auto-logging capabilities?

[Bill Hassell]

> Excellent... OK so to get the full GUI of swinstall then I would need to to use an Xwindows interface.

Correct. Once you have the X11 emulator running correctly, you sign on to the HP-UX box, export the DISPLAY variable and now SAM and swinstall will switch to a GUI interface.

> Anything Xwindows (free) that will be geared for HP and give me some auto-logging capabilities?

Auto-logging is not an Xwindow feature, it is a character (terminal) user interface. If you run swinstall or SAM, you'll see that because of all the buttons and multiple windows, logging like a TUI simply isn't practical. That's one of the reasons that swinstall and SAM both have their own extensive logging built-in.

[rightbrain]

I think at this stage I may be suffering from too much and/or conflicting information. I understand there are security risks with auto-login so we will not be doing that. I am looking for the following then:

I want the best graphics possible. Our paid version 7 of Exceed does the trick. I am concerned about security as the only "start methods" they have available are REXEC, RSH, RLOGIN, TELNET, PCX, and hPRS. I know nothing about them. I want security so I probably need to use something from my desktop that does that whether it be SSH or whatever. I don't want to loose the graphics. Could someone supply a recommendation with a link that will work for that purpose?

Sorry to keep going around on this.