fixing distant computer via remote control

[John D Lamb]

On Sun, 2011-11-20 at 15:11 -0500, Bill Stanley wrote:

>  > First, you need a way to find your neighbour’s IP address. There are
>  > sites like no-ip.com that provide the ip address for free.
> 
> Question... Since the ISP probably uses NAT, this would probably change 
> over time.  Whenever my neighbor wants me to do a fix remotely, can I 
> ask her to run a command to learn the IP address?  Her computer is 
> connected directly to the ISP cable with no router between.  Maybe 
> ifconfig would work?

You can check the IP address on the title bar or settings under
connection settings on your neighbour’s computer. If the address starts
192.168.… you have to negotiate NAT. Otherwise you may be able to run
services on your neighbour’s computer and login directly through ssh
into your neighbour’s computer.

You can find a bit more on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VNC about
desktop sharing/VNC and on
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/152 about setting up ssh
without a password — the security comes from using a key pair, which is
better than sending a password over even a secure connection. The one
thing I would recommend is using either UFW (the standard Ubuntu
firewall) or a router to prevent any more connections than necessary to
a machine. On my machine with a fixed IP address I allow ssh and nothing
else. And even then the firewall logs can register hundreds of failed
ssh attempts per day. 

-- 
John D Lamb