[ubuntu-uk] Remote support for family & friends

[Alan Pope]

On 24 March 2011 07:42, Byte Soup <bytesoup at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do any of you have friends and family not living nearby, who use Ubuntu and
> you provide remote support to them. What do you use? Teamviewer, VNC, webex?
> What would you recommend and whats your experiences?
>

At mums house when I installed the Ubuntu PC:-

1) Install ssh-server, create my user account, add my ssh key so I can
logon remotely
2) Enable remote desktop sharing in Ubuntu via the usual GUI options
3) Register a dynamic hostname with dyndns.org
4) Install and configure ddclient to connect and register with
dyndns.org for the chosen hostname

Total time spent: 5 minutes, plus 1 hour mostly drinking tea, chatting
to my mum.

At my house

1) Phone rings!
"Hello Alan, it's Mum, can you help me?"
"Sure, one moment"

2) Open a terminal and type:-

vncviewer -via mums.dynamicdyns.org localhost

*bam* I see her desktop over an encrypted ssh tunnel. No ports exposed
her end other than ssh, and only key-based logon allowed.

Win!

Al.