On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Roger Oberholtzer
I would like to enable remote access to openSUSE systems that are running in road vehicles around the world. The idea is to use tethering via a USB telephone. The thing is that we want to access the devices remotely. It is not that the vehicles need to access anything. We need to access them.
The idea is to use a telephone with a local phone company SIM (supplied by the local owner of the system), connected to the openSUSE box via a USB cable. Obviously the local phone company has to allow tethering in such a way that one can find the telephone. It is not enough that the telephone can find us.
How best to do this? Our biggest worry is that we may make assumptions about what the local telephone companies allow. My initial thought is to use some dynamic DNS service. I guess that assumes that there is a route back to the telephone. I have seen suggestions that a tunnel be created. Might that be more robust in the light of local phone company differences? I guess we need a 'lowest common denominator' solution.
Anyone know of a good tutorial on this? Something written this century. There seems to be lots of old info that is usually very incomplete. And they all seem to be about using the connection to access the internet. Not for the internet to access you. I must be crap at choosing search words...
I'm guessing your problem is, you need to connect to the remote computer, but you don't know at any point what that remote IP will be (employee laptops in a mobile situation using GPRS/3G/Edge via mobile networks to connect, and the employee cannot be expected to discover and inform you what the temporary IP address is) Just brain storming here... - Use a standard mobile phone with a data contract - Enable WiFi hotspot on a mobile phone when a connection is required at a remote location (definitely possible with Android phones, not sure on iPhones... last iPhone I had, tethering wasn't allowed unless I rooted the phone) - Use standard WiFi to connect the laptop to the WiFi hotspot provided by the mobile phone - Use ddclient in combination with DynDNS to auto-assign a URL/subdomain to the mobile device - You should then be able to connect to the remote computer using a preassigned domain/subdomain for that device.. (simplified example: ssh rogersscomputer.ramboll.se) In theory you should be able to use a service like DynDNS to assign a known URL to a dynamically changing IP address. The software that you use on the client-side (ddclient) is included within the openSUSE repositories. I've found that if you set a reasonable check interval (whatever your definition of reasonable is), DynDNS reacts very quickly and you have a valid URL/domain/subdomain you can connect to. DynDNS provides a web-tool to create your ddclient.conf file. You would need to prepare each remote computer at some point, installing ddclient and enabling the service... opening any ports etc for your remote login. Another thought, depending on what level of remote access you require... you could install TeamViewer on each remote computer, note the unique 9 digit ID TeamViewer assigns that computer. Then the remote employee only has to connect to his/her WiFi hotpsot provided by his/her Android phone, launch TeamViewer (desktop icon) and tell you the 4 digit one-time-use password that TeamViewer generates for that session. You can then log in and have full GUI access as that user (and can su to root as needed). C. -- openSUSE 12.2 x86_64, KDE 4.9.1 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org