[sf-lug] I need your Linux thoughts!

[Will]

TeamViewer is closed source but very cross-platform and quite simple to use
in my experience. Iirc you can setup a kind of customized executable that
people providing tech support can send to their clients, and when that
executable is run it connects to the configured person. There might be a
way to package up a script/executable that does this for ssh.

One thing to do might be a self-contained script/executable like that but
one that does a "ps" and "cat /etc/issue" and "find / > contents.txt" then
either emails them or somehow sends them to you, so it would take further
instruction but it would give you a much better idea of what you're dealing
with.

HTH

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 9:28 PM, miro drahos <mirni.zbirni at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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