Shell Companion: terminal tasks, without the terminal
The Shell Companion, part of Managed OIE, is an embedded remote terminal which lives within the same network context as your OIE instance, allowing you to easily diagnose your integration channel connections through the use of its industry-standard CLI toolkit.
A managed service usually asks you to relinquish root access, and the shell tooling goes with it. NovaMap's Shell Companion makes that tooling available from the portal.
The network context
The network context is the source of your instance's communications. A connectivity test from your laptop tells you what your laptop can reach. A connectivity test from inside the instance's network tells you what the channel can actually reach, which is what you need to know when a downstream endpoint is refusing connections and the firewall team says everything's open.
Why not just permit SSH?
With the managed service, we take on the responsibilities that come with root access: system updates, security patches, and hardening the host, so you can focus on building your integrations. The Shell Companion keeps shell-based debugging available through a defined set of operations exposed from the portal, rather than raw SSH.
You get the reassurance of a managed service alongside the tooling you'd reach for anyway.
What's in the toolkit
The Shell Companion comes with a range of common networking and diagnostic tools:
- telnet
- ping
- traceroute
- openssl
- sslscan
- dig
- nslookup
- netstat
- curl
- ssh
- tcpdump
The list may change over time.
Your work is saved between sessions
The Shell Companion has storage allocated out of your instance's quota, so you can save debug scripts and resources and quickly pick up where you left off, or build a set of tests specific to your channels and re-run them whenever you need to.
That turns your debugging into a constructive routine. The connectivity checks you write while developing a channel are the same ones you'll need the next time that endpoint misbehaves, and you'll still find them there.
Built to NHS standards
NovaMap is ISO 27001:2022 certified. 25+ NHS Trusts and healthcare system vendors send 1.5M+ messages a day through our products. Security is built in, including support for mTLS and certificate management via the OIE TLS plugin.
Managed OIE gives you the confidence of enterprise support and the freedom of open source.
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