Suggestion to make remote recovery easier

[Andrew Sayers]

Justin,

I agree that a single solution would be best, but I can't see how to
make it work in the case of a system that's mostly broken.  However, it
looks like it's going to be an evidentiary question - either we can make
it work or we can't.  How would you feel about the following working
arrangement:

I'll rewrite my "remote recovery" blueprint based on ideas discussed
here, focussing solely on the worst case; you write up a "remote help"
blueprint focussing on the common case.  Then we'll liberally
criticque/merge/steal ideas and see where that goes.  If we wind up with
a single blueprint, great!  If not, we'll have a good solution for the
general case and an ugly solution that's just usable enough to bootstrap
into the general case.

In the spirit of working towards the middle then...

I agree that VNC would be better in the common case.  In fact, using VNC
leaves the door open to someday expanding the solution to Windows-using
friends, although that's definitely a version 2 idea.

If we agree that passwords are best in the case of an emergency phone
call from someone with no prior relationship, I think we should use keys
everywhere else, but leave key exchange up to users.  I agree that
web/e-mail is better for people who aren't that paranoid, but those that
are more paranoid will want the freedom to use whatever mechanism they
trust.

Showing the SSH session to the user in the recovery case is a very good
idea, and should be fairly simple to implement.  Some sort of chat
session is also a good idea, so long as we can implement it so that two
people aren't trying to type on the same command line at the same time.
 That should just involve putting chat and commands in two separate ttys.

Another use case we need to think about is broken video
cards/monitors/etc. that make it impossible for the non-technical friend
to use their computer at all.  This suggests that the expert should be
able to log in by default, rather than having access only granted on
request.

	- Andrew