[ale] fixing linux laptop remotely

[Todor Fassl]

I have to admit that I am not much of a hacker. I use sssh all the time 
every day but I had/have no idea what "reverse ssh" is. Googling shows 
me this:
https://www.howtoforge.com/reverse-ssh-tunneling

That does look like exactly what I want.  I am going to have to practice 
it myself before I can tell my buddy what to do. But, yeah, that looks 
like the ticket.

Yeah, that's the ticket!




On 1/24/19 12:42 PM, DJ-Pfulio via Ale wrote:
> 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.
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-- 
Todd