Using Syzkaller on Command-line only Server

Why?

When I’m using Syzkaller on our lab’s server, a problem occurs is that our server has no GUI, which means I can not use web broswer to visit the Syzkaller dashboard. That’s quite bothering because I need to check whether Syzkaller find any bugs.

How?

Method 1. W3M

W3M is a text-based web broswer that allows you visit a web page via terminal. To install and use it, simply run:

sudo apt install w3m
w3m http://localhost:56741

This will open the Syzkaller dashboard in your terminal, however, it’s quite inconvenient because when we need to check the log or report generated by Syzkaller, the output is hard to read and it takes a long time to wait for response and parse it. So I recommand the second method.

Method 2. SSH Port Forwarding

SSH port forwarding is a mechanism in SSH for tunneling application ports from the client machine to the server machine. For this condition, we just need to simply forward the Syzkaller port to our local port, and we can visit the dashboard from local broswer. There are two ways to use it:

• Directly add in command line

  # localport:remotemachine:remoteport
  ssh -L 8080:localhost:56741 xxx@xxx
  

• Add it in ssh configuration

  Host xxx
  HostName xxx
  User xxx
  # LocalForward localmachine:localport remotemachine:remoteport
  LocalForward localhost:8080 localhost:56741
  

And connect to server again, then you can view the dashboard from your local broswer. Done!