Introduction

Sometimes, we need to execute commands on a remote machine. There are many

commercial, shareware, and freeware products that can be used for this purpose. Here I
present a simple Java program that can be easily modified to suit your needs. We all know the
"write once, run everywhere" slogan, so the code will be working fine on any platform that has
a Java Virtual Machine (JVM; but don't blame me if it breaks, I only tested it on NT and AIX). I
have to warn the readers that the source code included with this article is just one example of
how this can be accomplished and it has only minimal security, so use it at your own risk but it
should not be hard for you to add sophisticated security.

The Java classes

The RemoteShellServer class implements the server side of the program. It first creates a

server socket so that clients can connect to it. When a client is connected to the server, it will
spawn a new thread using the CommandRunner class to handle the client's request. The main
thread will continue to listen for new client.

The CommandRunner class implements the server thread that handles the client's request.
First, it reads a command and an input to this command from the connected client. Both the
command and its input are represented as byte arrays. It then creates a new process to
execute the command and writes the input data to the created process. The output and error
from the created processed will be read and send back to the client. The connected client may
continue to send commands and input data which will be executed by this thread one by one.
The server thread will not terminate if any process it created is still running, so be careful
about what you are asking the server to do.

The RemoteShellClient class is an example of the client-side code. All it does is sending

the command and its input provided by the user to the server and receiving the output from
the server. If you want to execute commands on the remote machine from your program
using this tool, you can write the client-side code based on this class. If I have time, I will
provide a C++ client program with GUI for this tool later. I have actually embedded the client
code within a web page (as applet) so that I can control the server machine anywhere (within
the firewall, of course). This could be very dangerous, which is why the applet I put on my
website is restricted to only executing certain "safe" commands on the server.

The SockData class is used to provide a way to send and receive byte arrays between the
client and the server in a platform-independent way. The first 4 bytes of the data is the length
of the remaining data block.

How to build and use the program

The JavaBuild.bat file contains commands to compile and bundle the Java code into
a RemoteShell.jar file. You have to copy RemoteShell.jar to both machines and set
the CLASSPATH environment to include this file. If you use the the provided batch files to run
the server or client, I set theCLASSPATH for you.

Here are the commands to start the server program at port 50001

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java RemoteShellServer 50001 207.46.230.219

java RemoteShellServer 50001 207.46.
java RemoteShellServer 50001 .microsoft.com
java RemoteShellServer 50001

The first command instructs the server to listen at port 50001 and only accepts connections
from the machine with IP address 207.46.230.219. With the second command, the server only
accepts connections from machines whose IP addresses contain the string  207.46. Similarly,
the third command makes the server to accept only connections from machines whose
addresses end with .microsoft.com. The server will accept connections from anywhere with the
last command (Ouch).

To start the client, you have to specify the server IP address and port number, plus the
command you want to execute on the server and its input data. For example, if you want to
know what files are in the system directory of the server (assuming it is NT/Win2K), then do
this:

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java RemoteShellClient myserver.ipaddress.com 50001

"cmd" "dir c:\winnt\system32"

You will see the following output on the server console:

Client 'myclient.ipaddress.com' executed command 'cmd' with input 'dir c:\winnt\system32'

On the client console, you will see the following example output just as if you have typed  dir
c:\winnt\system32 on the server machine:

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10/14/96 02:38a 13,584 runonce.exe

07/12/99 12:53p 54,464 s3trio3d.dll
02/01/00 02:19p 17,920 Sales.dll
10/15/98 12:04p 41,744 SAMLIB.DLL
10/15/98 12:04p 170,256 SAMSRV.DLL
10/15/98 12:04p 23,312 SAVEDUMP.EXE
10/15/98 12:04p 152,336 SCHANNEL.DLL
...

Please note that the input data to your client command can have multiple lines, so it is
possible to run a script file with the cmd command (I just don't know how to type multiple
lines into one line :-). If you want, you can start GUI applications on the server, but you
cannot really see the GUI from the client. The following will launch notepad and wordpad on
the server machine.

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java RemoteShellClient myserver.ipaddress.com 50001 "notepad.exe" ""

java RemoteShellClient myserver.ipaddress.com 50001
"write.exe c:\test.txt" ""

You have to kill the instances of notepad and wordpad on the server in order to terminate the
two threads in the server process. The following will launch notepad and wordpad on the
server without tying up two threads in the server process:

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java RemoteShellClient myserver.ipaddress.com 50001 "cmd" "notepad.exe"

java RemoteShellClient myserver.ipaddress.com 50001 "cmd" "write.exe
c:\test.txt"

Ok, that's it. Thank you for reading and please go to my homepage for more articles and
programs. You may now start the constructive criticism :-)

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article
text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion
board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here