[sf-lug] I need your Linux thoughts!

[miro drahos]

ssh ships with pretty much all UNIXes, AFAIK. VNC is an overkill and may be
complicated to get it to work. Besides, unless you tunnel it via ssh it's
inherently insecure. And for all you know the machine might not even have a
display! Stick with ssh, is my advice.
The hard part might not be the ssh on their end, but rather firewalls
between you and them. So the first thing you should try is to acquire IP
address of the remote machine, and probe the ports with nmap or something
similar to see whether port 22 is open. If it is, then you can try ssh, and
if you are prompted for authorization you know you are good.
If you get 22 to their IP filtered, then there still may be some options,
like forward the ssh via a different port. Then they would create a tunnel
on their side to *you*:

ssh -R 9999:localhost:22 localuser at yourlocalmachine.domain.com

and you would ssh via port 9999 (that would get forwarded to 22 on the
remote server):

ssh -p 9999 user at remote.server.com

Hope this helps,
Miro



On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 8:41 PM, John F. Strazzarino <jstrazza at yahoo.com>wrote:

> A work project...
>
> A very small number of our customers use Linux and one of them is having
> an issue.
>
> Here's what needs to be done:
>
> 1) We need to remotely log into their computer. Computer is in Salt Lake
> City.
> 2) We need to issue a few commands on their system.
>
> Here's the challenge:
>
> 1) We have NO idea (NO idea) which version of Linux (or Unix) they are
> using.
> 2) We'll have to assume that they person in front of the computer is not
> at all computer-literate..
> 3) We don't know what additional software is on the computer
>
> Questions:
>
> 1) Which remote control software is dirt-simple to install and run?
> (Hamachi, RealVNC, etc) or could we use something like SSH?  REMEMBER, the
> person behind the computer knows NOTHING about computers.  We need to get
> access to their computer to do our work.
>
> Assumptions/Guesses:
>
> 1) We're guessing that they have either Red Hat Fedora or Ubuntu
> 2) We're hoping that they have the root password (which I guess we need to
> install software)
> 3) There is commercial software on the computer and we MAY be able to quiz
> the software company about how to access the computer, etc.  However, it
> sounds like the software company is not being very forthcoming with
> information.  However, they must have some sort of remote access software,
> otherwise how could they install updates/patches to their software?
>
> Also:
>
> I've just started to research this, so sorry about not providing more info.
>
> Thanks
>
> John
>
>
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