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I have my personal stuff hosted with a company that uses cpanel. It seems that a "feature" of cpanel is that the hosting company can use their "jailshell" when granting (terminal, not goofy AJAX faked) SSH access. Unfortunately you do not have access to /dev/pty and when trying to run screen you get the error:

Must be connected to a terminal.

I have also tried "ssh -t example.com screen" but get the same result.

Has anyone every gotten screen to work under jailshell, or on a host where you do not have access to /dev/pty?

Bruno Bronosky
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about how to work around a restriction intentionally set up by a service of which you are a user. – Falcon Momot Jun 28 '13 at 09:20
  • This question appears to be off-topic because it concerns the use of shared web hosting by end users or resellers, rather than the administration of web hosting. – Michael Hampton Jun 28 '13 at 19:56

5 Answers5

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Nicely ask your host to enable /bin/bash It's literally a one click "upgrade" in WHM that takes 10 seconds to enable. If they won't do it, then you are stuck as everyone else has said.

jemmille
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  • I did ask for access to bash and was told that it would give me root access and they, of course, can't do that on a shared server. I know that is a load of crap because my day job is as a MySQL DBA, Linux System Administrator, and Manager of a team of Linux System Administrators. I didn't argue because I know that arguing with someone who is willing to lie to you and insult your intelligence... is a fruitless demonstration of your lack of intelligence. What I didn't know is that WHM controls it. I will try to social engineer my way into it. Thanks for the lead. – Bruno Bronosky Jul 27 '09 at 03:56
  • @jemmille, I had root access but not WHM acceess (it's my client's VPS server). Can I do this from root account instead? Is changing the user shell into /bin/bash is enough? – Donny Kurnia Sep 30 '11 at 04:08
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You need pseudo tty's for screen to work, there's no way around that. Unless you can convince your hosting company to bind mount /dev in to your chroot jail there's not really much else you can hope to do.

Kamil Kisiel
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You don't GNU Screen needs a working pty to function correctly.

serverhorror
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Screen needs a proper tty to work. It needs an environment as good as when you would login using telnet/ssh/console (ie. a working terminal).

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Ram Prasad
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  • No offense, but I hope there is something you guys are overlooking. I'm going to leave this open a little longer. What I have is a working terminal (ssh connection), but I have a limited (possibly chrooted) shell. – Bruno Bronosky Jun 12 '09 at 06:14
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You're stuck. Screen needs a tty to work.

Bill Weiss
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