Piping stdout and stdin to/from a socket

I'm kind of surprised no one has tried doing this before...or at least I haven't found anyone attempting to do this. Perhaps it's too closely related to SSH for people to bother.  Basically, what I am trying to do is create a class (in Java) that launches a subprocess, and in which the stdout, stderr and stdin of the process are all linked to a network socket.  The key advantage to this over SSH is that unlike SSH, if you close your terminal, you don't also kill your process(es) (though I'm not sure if there's already a way to do this in SSH).  And of course, this will be applicable to windows platform.

I'm using the Netty project currently as my low level NIO network framework.  It's not too bad, but I do seem to be having some trouble getting the asynchronous event driven nature of Netty working with the thread reading mechanic of the stdout and stdin reader of the subprocess.  Basically, in order to read the stdout of the subprocess, I have a separate thread running which is constantly checking to see if there's anything in the process's InputStream (yeah, confusing...go look at the java.lang.Process class, but stdout is actually an InputStream).

So what I have to do is somehow, in the Runnable's run() method, pass Netty's Channel object to the Thread object and write the output to the channel.  I can currently see when a client connects to the server, and the server can send a basic message, but I can't seem to pass the (shared) channel object (which I assign when the channel is connected) and have the stdout reader thread be able to use it.

Still, I feel like I'm on the right track.  And since I think this could be a useful project, I'll open source this.  Eventually, if I ever get it working, I'll port it to clojure.  I'd eventually like to add a security layer (Netty has SSL support).  But first things first.