Remote access to a machine running SystemRescueCD ?

Gabriel_Blake · Guru Joined: 16 Sep 2007 Posts: 362

Hi.

A friend of mine, who is not that handy with computers and lives over 1000 kilometers away from me, just had a system failure - Windows failure of course. Additionally I expect the partition table to be broken. I don't think he'll manage to use SystemRescueCD to make a backup or repair partitions and stuff. But I could guide him how to connect to the net and setup some remote connection right ? What would be the easiest way to do it ? I'm thinking of rdesktop or ssh (but I could use a GUI).

Any advice would be welcome.

nemectic · Apprentice Joined: 20 Aug 2004 Posts: 182

If he loads SysRescueCD, you should be able to talk him through setting up ssh & giving you his IP easy enough.
You could then set up TigerVNC or rDesktop yourself through the ssh connection - everything is already on the CD.

Gabriel_Blake · Guru Joined: 16 Sep 2007 Posts: 362

Is there any chance of connecting if he's in a local network, and I have an external IP ?

nemectic · Apprentice Joined: 20 Aug 2004 Posts: 182

Possibly. The router can be set up to forward all incoming packets on a specific port to a his computer. It's doable over a VPN as well, but not worth setting up for this.

This is assuming it's a your friends network, or he can get the network admin to do it for him. Otherwise I don't know of any way it would work.

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 23055

All networks are local somewhere. (Corollary: it is always happy hour somewhere.)

If you have a publicly reachable IP address, you could have him ssh to you and use a reverse port forwarding so that your sshd creates a listening port that forwards traffic over his ssh connection back to his system. This might even be easier than walking him through configuring NAT level port forwarding on his end.