How to connect remote Linux box through PHP in windows environment - php

Question

I'm on a Windows XP machine, with Wamp installed. Currently, I am using putty to connect my remote Linux boxes.
I want to execute Linux commands through php shell_exec() method (cp, ls, ...).
Does anybody know how to connect my Linux box first and then run those commands in a Windows environment?
Any advice's would be highly appreciated...

Answer 1

You can't run Linux commands in Windows.
You can run them over SSH, using putty. It seems you have that running.
You can forward the connection over ssh. Look in the putty screen, go to Connection > SSH > Tunnels.
Then you add a tunnel:
source port: 1234
destination port: localhost:80
type is Local
So you open Internet Explorer, type in the addres bar: http://localhost:1234 the port 1234 is then forwarded to the port 80 on the remote linux pc.
You can also forward it to the WAMP by setting
destination port: *ip of the wamp server*:80
Then you can acces the Windows pc from outside the network, as long as putty is running.

Answer 2

It sounds like you want a PHP script on Windows to run SSH commands on a remote Linux server. For this, see the PHP SSH2 extension.
Bindings to the libssh2 library which provide access to resources
(shell, remote exec, tunneling, file transfer) on a remote machine
using a secure cryptographic transport.
This will allow you to connect to the Linux server via SSH and execute commands on the remove server (cp, ls, etc.). Here's some sample code:
$connection = ssh2_connect('shell.example.com', 22);
ssh2_auth_password($connection, 'username', 'password');
$stream = ssh2_exec($connection, 'hostname');
echo "Output: " . stream_get_contents($stream);
It's worth noting that this probably isn't the safest or most reliable way to go about this task.

Answer 3

I don't think you can execute linux commands on a windows machine.
You might want to consider using OpenSSH for Windows
and skip the php.
But you will get you a Windows Shell. C:\\> and no ls or cp, but otherwise full control.
You could also get experimental and run a Virtual machine with linux and share your windows drive with it.
remote server linux - - ssh - - > local virtual linux - - - shared folder - - > windows

Answer 4

You could either:
Install CYGWIN
Install SSH2 extension for PHP
There is an extended SSH2 class I use, which can be found here: SSH2 with Exception Handling.