On Thursday 22 September 2005 23:41, Mike Katz wrote:
Does anyone know of any remote desktop software, similar to gotomypc, that I could host on my own server? What we are basically looking for is a free/inexpensive solution that requires very little setup on the side of the PC to be controlled, so that we can do remote support from any location. Ideally somethng that doesnt require firewall configuration. UltraVNC has a pretty good single click config, that does what we want on the user end, but from our side we still need to config the firewall. Is there such a beast in the OSS/Linux world?
If you want to avoid firewall configuration entirely, then the connection has to come from the PC that is to be controlled. There is no way you are going to get an incoming connection through a firewall without explicit configuration. Given this, and given that the server hosting this would have to be outside the firewall so the remote supporter can connect to it, there is a not too difficult and low cost version of this On each PC that is to have this, initiate an ssh connection to your server that sets up a reverse tunnel to the VNC port. You can give each PC its own port on the server. Then when you want to connect, you use your VNC client to connect to the relevant port on the server, which will pipe you through the firewall to the PC requiring support. I hope I don't need to tell you what a security fallacy it is to allow this or any other service (including gotomypc, which does more or less the same thing) to traverse your firewall like this. The security of the internal network is moved from the firewall (easily maintained and monitored) to the passwords of the tunnels going over it (nightmare)