On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 09:45:55AM +0100, Etienne wrote:
> On 13/07/17 09:36, Philippe wrote:
> > The best option to me was a reverse SSH. A script connect them
> > automatically to my server @home, opening a specific port so I can
> > connect to their computers.
> >
> > It works, it's simple, they don't have to do anything, they even can go
> > anywhere I'll still be able to help them. You don't have to worry about
> > NAT and dynamic IP addresses anymore. :-)
> >
> +1. And the script they run to start a reverse SSH session can also create a
> tunnel for VNC, and start x11vnc.
>
Many ways to do this:
1) I use iStat menus on the MacOS. The network icon can be configured
to tell you what IP addresses your Mac is on. The disavantages are
that iStat menus isn't free and I'll have to tell my family how to
get their IP address which is simpler with iStat but not drop dead
simple. Alternatives to this approach would be iTerm configured to
launch an appropriate ssh session to my house by default.
2) When I did a lot of "family-support" with my father-in-law, I ran
an OpenBSD box as his firewall/edge router. I had an IPSec VPN up
between our houses all the time. The router used bootp via mac
address rather than dhcp for family Mac's where I had to do support
so I always knew where to VNC to. This was pretty simple for me
because I use OpenBSD as my edge router and and OpenBSD <-->
OpenBSD IPSec tunnel is pretty simple to setup. The disadvantages
here are at this point you really own this network and if your
family calls their ISP for support they will probably screw things
up pretty badly. But I found OpenBSD on Soekris to be stable enough
that this wasn't really a problem.
If forced into a situation where I had to do support without an IPSec
VPN via the NATed and LAN IP's I'd probably spend an afternoon writing
a python-tkinter program to display that information. Something really
simple like: Your Lan IP is: x.x.x.x / Your outside IP is: y.y.y.y and
then an exit button. Then I would enable VNC.
--
Chris
__o "All I was trying to do was get home from work."
_`\<,_ -Rosa Parks
___(*)/_(*)____.___o____..___..o...________ooO..._____________________
Christopher Sean Hilton [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com]
