I have this project for my classes i'm currently workin' on. here it is:

• WebPage client for Telnet not on standard ports, with ability to choose a port and connect

I have machines with Telnet servers on them, just waiting for connection.

So my idea was to set up a nodeJS with express server on a dedicated machine. This would handle connections through telnet and host a page for clients, that would use socket.io to exchange information with server side.

But as i'm new to such technologies (telecommunications student) i wonder if it is possible. I spotted something like this - jsterm.com by Peter Nitsch, but i see there are some massive gaps in code and the demo does not really work so i don't know if it actually works. Did anyone try this?

My other problem is - when i send information to nodeJS server through websockets, which seems achievable for me, what do i do with this information? Do i just set up another websocket to pass the same data i got from client websocket directly to the telnet port?

Can sockets connect directly to specific port, without any websocket waiting on the other side?

If my idea is wrong, could anyone help me - maybe there exists some nice solution - i was thinking about Anyterm for example but i see that it requires an apache server and runs completely different technologies...

Just to be clear, WebSocket connections are not raw TCP socket connections. They have extra header information in each packet, browser to server data is masked using a running XOR, etc.

In order for the browser to communicate with a normal TCP server (e.g. a telnet server) you will need some sort of bridge service. It just so happens that such a thing already exists. websockify is a server that accepts WebSocket connections and bridges them to a raw TCP server.

In fact, the websockify project already includes a working telnet client as an example application. However, note that one limitation of websockify (for security reasons) is that the client cannot pick an arbitrary server address/port to connect to. The target address(es) must be predefined, either as a single target specified on the command line for websockify, or as multiple targets specified in a configuration file (and selected via a token in the WebSocket connect string).

There are multiple implementations of websockify in different languages (python, C, node, ruby, Clojure) however, only the python version currently supports multiple targets via a configuration file.

Disclaimer: I created websockify.