Remote Administering of Parents' Computer

rongten

Hello,
As the title of the post suggests, I have decided that
the only way of not having frustrating international phone
calls with home when dealing with computer problems
is to go all the way to a full remote administering.

There are two computer that I would like to administer,
one is still to come, possibly a SFF box to put in my parents
room, behind a hub and an alcatel speed touch pro modem
router, another one my mother's PC at school, behind
some new hardware firewall/routing system they recently installed there.

Both are based on SuSE 9.0, indeed at the moment at home
SuSE is /dev/hdb in my sister's computer. Since she is not
parents friendly, and screams bloody murder when the mouse
is not exactly in the same place where she left it, a new
PC for my parents only is the solution.

Now, I would like to now if between the gentooers somebody
is doing something similar, and if he could give me some tips.
Up to now, the most important thing is to be able to ssh
in those machines. I am testing this with my PC at home
that is in a similar configuration: PC behind ADSL modem
router. First thing is to create an account at www.dyndns.org
or similar services, install and configure correctly software
like ddclient,and setup the NAT portion in the modem
to forward to the PC port 22 for ssh. Configure sshd in a
proper way, like allowing access only from specific domains
etc. etc. This is the most basic thing. I read that you
could use utilities like screen to show in the remote machine
what are you doing, but I do not care, I just want to do
stuff like installing programs, saving their configurations,
update the system etc.

Theoretically speaking, nothing else is needed, once
you can perform a login via ssh with pass-phrase authentication
as a user, and after su -, you are root. But I am worried
that once I set up the machine and go back home, I will
realise I miss another utility, or set of utilities, that maybe
would have been better to install locally, fiddling more
easily with modem, HD, connections etc. etc.

Is there anybody that can give an advice, so that I can
train here, and go fully prepared to my parents' home?

For all the others, sorry for the long and boring post..
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misterLu · Guru Joined: 14 Sep 2003 Posts: 430 Location: Poland

1) (Obvious) If you want to connect to your parents computer via ssh as a normal user, remember to add ths user to 'wheel' group. Otherwise you will do nothing.
2) remember to add ddclient to default rc-level, that it could update IP every time they start their machine, and add it to crontab, just in case their IP changes.
3) Enable ssh -X, it maybe usefull when your parents wont be able to set some params in Opera or other graphical program.
4) Be carefull with firewall, that you would be able to ssh from outside of parent's house.
No more idea...

rongten · Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2004 7:58 am Post subject:

Hello,
I am already familiar with the modem/router configuration
and the use of ddclient as a client in background, on gentoo.

On the machines back home, I will have to figure out the
way to implement them in SuSE, but you could assume I know
how to configure the remote access.

Just to be more clear. I send as a gift to my mother a
Palm Tungsten E bought on ebay. So, can I tell her,
go to yast, look for jpilot, install it, do the backup etc. etc. (The fact that the new palm os could have
issues with the linux software we leave for later.) ?

No way.

So, I must be able to tell her to turn the computer on,
so that I can install jpilot, and tell her to plug the
palm so that I can verify that dlpsh works, and finally
tell her to look for jpilot in the menus or create
a menu item for her.

Beside ssh, is there some tool that could help me
in similar tasks?

I am sure that when I will back home
I will realize that I have something missing,
so I wanted to inquiry in advance...
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ecatmur · Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2004 10:59 am Post subject:

Make sure you install a duplicating VNC client (krfb most probably) and that it runs automatically in each user's session. It will be deathly slow of course but will help in diagnosing problems.

I'm doing something not too different: I administer my parents' network remotely, but they need Windows for full Microsoft Office compatibility (it's not too bad: my mother is smart enough to not install viruses or spyware, and my father uses his work laptop) so all I have to administer is the print server, although I have installed Cygwin on the Windows XP box just in case.

What I've done is to install a VPN using OpenVPN (with endpoints on two super-stable Debian machines) and use that to create a virtual bridge between the two class C networks (192.168.0.* at home, 192.168.1.* here); this lets me shell into each box directly and also go straight to the CUPS and Webmin pages on the Linux boxes, and even the router control page.

rongten · Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2004 11:28 am Post subject:

Thanks ecatmur,

remote desktop sharing is something I did not think
of, maybe was a little scary for me, a lot of new things
to learn..

But I guess this would be the panacea, and, as suggested
misterLu, this could become necessary for some applications;
in reality I was hoping that I could only edit config files..

But if I learn how to setup this vnc correctly, I guess
there is very little more I could do.

Your situation is more complex, as your needs are
more diverse.

No need of printers and similia, and I do not need to
touch the Windows box of my sister: I will steer well
clear of it.

Ssh and vnc seems more than enough to
keep me busy for a while.
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TrippyZ · n00b Joined: 04 Dec 2002 Posts: 38

You could consider using xmx for application support so that your direct you parents on the use of certain applications.

rongten · Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2004 10:19 am Post subject:

Hello,

at the moment I emerged libvncserver and tightvnc,
and I was going to try this weekend with the configurations,
testing the viewer with both servers to test the difference. If the

Once I am able to test a connection between office and
home, I could test other alternatives, like xmx. I will need to
emerge KDE as well to see if I can use its rfb capabilities..
A lot of work to do.. so little time..
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rongten · Posted: Sun Apr 04, 2004 6:29 pm Post subject:

Hello,

following the instruction in
http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/
using ssh connection and the vncviewer of
tightvnc I was able to access the display
of my office PC.

Once vncviewer started I was presented with the
screensaver screen with the prompt for a
password... Incredible!

I will look better to be sure that the ssh
connection is working properly, but all in
all it works remarcably well.

At this point I think I do not need anything else,
this is just the minimum to be able to
guide my parents.
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