[ale] fixing linux laptop remotely

[DJ-Pfulio]

Would a reverse ssh not work?  Use autossh to make persistence easier.
Then you could manage his workstation using ansible or any other
ssh-based method.

Or did I misunderstand?

On 1/24/19 12:52 PM, Todor Fassl via Ale wrote:
> I gave a friend in another state a laptop with debian stretch installed.
> He is a very smart guy but knows next to nothing about computers. Today,
> he emailed me asking if I could tell him how to fix some stuff. Well, I
> told him but it is pretty scary.  I mean he is the kind of person to
> whom I'd have to explain what it means to press Alt+F2. If I say type
> "sudo apt-get install ...", I am going to tell him not to type the
> quotes. Get it? He is really smart but he just never got into computers.
> To tell you the truth, he just uses the laptop to play D&D with us.
> 
> Anyway, openssh-server is installed and running. But he is always going
> to be behind a firewall. What I'd like to do is to have his laptop look
> for updates on my linux server when it boots up. So if I want to install
> something, I put a file on my server that says "apt-get install ..." and
> when he reboots, it downloads that script and runs it. Or something like
> that.
> 
> Or maybe a way for his machine to make a connection to my server that I
> can then take over and start typing commands?. I don't know. Any ideas
> welcome.
> 
> One complication, I'm blind so whatever I end up doing probably cannot
> be GUI based. Few remote GUI apps are going to work with a screen
> reader. For example, I can run an X11 program on a remote machine and
> have the GUI appear on my machine but the screen reader cannot do
> anything with the GUI.  It knows there's a window there but it cannot
> read it.