I think we’ve all been there.  You’re at work or at school and you get a ping from a monitor you’ve got setup that one of your VPSes is having a problem.

Maybe disk is filling up or web sites aren’t responding.  You want to jump in and quickly fix the issues…but you don’t have outbound SSH.

It’s great if you can switch networks to your phone’s hotspot, but that’s not always possible.  If you don’t to wait until you get home (by which time you could have lost billions of dollars!), here are a few ways you can still connect.

Option 1: Use an SSH Web-Based Service

There are sites and services that make SSH available to you in your web browser.  sshweb.com is one and googling “web ssh” will lead you to others.  Since everything is going over port 443, as long as you can get to the web, you can use one of these services.

Be careful if you’re in one of those environments where your employer or educator puts an SSL cert on the browser and plays man-in-the-middle (aka “deep inspection”), in which case they’ll be able to read all of your SSH traffic.

Option 2: Host Your Own SSH Web-Based Service

This requires a little foresight, but you can host the same software that powers sshweb.com on a server of your choosing.

This may be better from the perspective of latency, and you can stand up as much redundancy as you wish.

Option 3: Your VM Provider’s Console

Most VM control panels come with console access.  Connect to your provider and fire it up, and you’ll be looking at a login prompt.  Once logging in, you can ssh from there to wherever you need to go.

One caveat is that in some cases, it’s VNC, which is a non-web connection that runs on a port which your unfriendly firewall may have blocked.  But a lot of big providers offer web-based consoles.

Option 4: Spin Up a VM

I’m sure there are others, but if you go to Vultr and spin up a VM, you can immediately access it via console.  Considering you only need their cheapest plan, you’d be paying $.005/hour as of this writing, and you can trash the VM as soon as you’re done.  You might be able to fix your problem for less than one cent.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.