Show HN: Termbox – Launch a Linux terminal with two clicks

Termbox is somewhat similar to the recently announced dply.co, but I think our approach is much better for the following reasons:<p>* The interface is super streamlined. Open the page, confirm captcha, click launch - boom, you got a terminal. The planned SSH support will be similar to that - no web page, just do ssh root@ubuntu.termbox.io and you get logged in to a Ubuntu box.<p>* We use VM based containers (hypercontainer.io) and not full VMs, so startup is very fast and instances are super cheap. 2 hours of the 512MB DigitalOcean server cost $0.014, 2 hours of a 512MB Termbox instance currently cost us around $0.0001<p>* Because our instances are so cheap, we do not impose any limits on the amount of boxes you can create. Just leave them behind, they will be cleaned up automatically.

FYI: This has a name clash with a fairly popular TUI library: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nsf&#x2F;termbox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nsf&#x2F;termbox</a>

Captcha doesn&#x27;t reset after first error message about server capacity, so when you click launch again it says captcha is wrong.

Stupid question maybe, but what would the use case for something like this be? Can I run a server on it?

After getting an over capacity error, you always get a captcha verification error and have to reload the page

Slightly off-topic but kind of not. Through the website, I found <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypercontainer.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypercontainer.io&#x2F;</a> which seems to fit really good for a use-case of mine.<p>However, it&#x27;s the first time I see HyperContainer. Anyone have anything good&#x2F;bad to say about it? The value proposition seems really attractive &quot;Fast as Container&quot; + &quot;Isolated by VM&quot; but can&#x27;t find anything about the tradeoffs so would love someone who tried it to write about their experience.

The server has limited resources of 32GB RAM, so sorry if you&#x27;re not getting in. The good news is that you can install it on your own hardware, it&#x27;s all open source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;termbox&#x2F;termbox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;termbox&#x2F;termbox</a>

I wonder if this can be used to hide malicious activity or even as a form of honeypot. Its simple to create such service then post&#x2F;advertise on reddit, and simply monitor all commands the users execute. Soon you will have a trove of all sort of malicious scripts used for crawling, automated purchasing, phishing, spamming etc. You can also use the service yourself to get lost in the crowd.

It was working for a bit, and then the terminal went blank with:<p><pre><code> lost server </code></pre> Edit: a refresh fixed it, but I lost my current shell session

over capacity and I get a captcha error when trying to select a different server. I have to reload the page -- never got to a terminal.

[ 0.182343] smpboot: CPU0: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2750 @ 2.40GHz (family: 0x6, model: 0x4d, stepping: 0x8)<p>Neat to see one of these connected to the internet serving a production service! I also have a C2750 system.

This seems cool, but I don&#x27;t know what to do with it, apart from sshing into my own server if I&#x27;m on a PC that doesn&#x27;t have a ssh client on it. Just remember to use 2FA.

It may be the HN effect, but after opening an Ubuntu session and a vi console, it started refreshing constantly and telling me:<p>STATUS Reconnecting<p>Will need to try again when the traffic slows down...

Seems to be no way to go back up the terminal, so if you run something like grep --help, you only get the bottom portion of the help section rather then the whole thing.

Probably want to disable the tmux keybinding for detach

I actually like it. I think it is well implemented and can be used to play around on command line with different flavors of linux. Well done!

Considering the captcha it actually takes 3 clicks to launch

If you do<p>ctrl-b d<p>to disconnect from tmux, it pretty much leaves the server useless.

over capacity. anyone have a screenshot for what the terminal looks like? Is there a countdown timer?

do you plan to have an API to create boxes and to run some predefined scripts on launch?

terminal.com all over again?<p>Great idea, closed in 6 months.

uhhhhhh<p>I can launch a Linux terminal with Super+Enter. (I run i3)