On a Google Chromebook you can access a UNIX-like terminal window by typing CTRL-T from the Chrome browser. This feature makes a Chromebook much more viable to use for technical people.
Without it, you'd have to setup your own HTTP/SSL Tunneling/Comet server at home to even come close to embedding a terminal in a web browser (a complicated setup project I have done before). So hat's off to whoever had the wherewithal to put that feature in.
The terminal's bound shell - called "crosh" - is however limited in the Chromebook's user mode for security purposes, so you won't be able to do your typical UNIX-y stuff on your Chromebook directly; but a copy of SSH has been provided to securely connect to a real UNIX-like machine over the internet.
One trick you can do is to use port-forwarding with this shell, enabling you to plug into a system like a protected web server deep behind a firewall, and have it deliver pages to your Chromebook as if the webserver were running on the Chromebook itself.
So given the following steps, you should be able to do this:
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You are at some location outside the network protecting the webserver you want to acccess.
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You are in the crosh shell on a Chromebook.
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You can publicly access an SSH host computer connected to the firewalled network.
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The SSH host has SSH access to the internal webserver sitting behind the firewall. The webserver is serving-up pages on that machine's local port 3000
In crosh, just run:
crosh> ssh
ssh> user (your username)
ssh> host (IP address or name of publicly-accessible SSH server)
ssh> forward 8000:(internal webserver IP address):3000
ssh> connect
(enter credentials)
Done! Leave everything alone.
Open a Chrome browser tab, and point it to:
http://localhost:8000
Bang! Your internal, firewall protected website is being served up to your local chromebook as if it were running on the chromebook itself. It's a freaking miracle.