What would you use to remotely support a computer with "LAN" access? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by lambda@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

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I have a few family members that I help support. For instance, I installed Linux Mint on my grandmother's PC. She doesn't know any different and my young cousin doesn't understand it so he finally stopped giving it viruses. I used to use TeamViewer to take over her PC when she needed support but I got my account banned because they believed I was using it commercially. Oh well!

I have Tailscale installed on the computers. This gives me SSH access. What would you suggest? RDP? Something else?

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[-] lambda@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Well, I want to be able to see the screen so that I can talk my grandma through stuff. I have fixed things through SSH and run updates that way too.

[-] disheveledWallaby@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

X forwarding should let you use GUI apps from the remote computer. Its not quite a full remote desktop experience though. You can see how to set up and use x forwarding on YouTube.

[-] notfromhere@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

I’ve used X11 over SSH before and it works great for some use cases, however it does not work with Wayland, so if their system supports it now, there’s no guarantee it will work after a major system update.

[-] disheveledWallaby@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I was curious about that as I haven't tried Wayland yet and its been a while since I've had any reason for an x session via ssh. Glad someone with first hand knowledge could chime in for OP and others as well as myself.

[-] notfromhere@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

I have heard they are either working on a similar thing for Wayland or already solved it.

This looks promising, but I have not used it before.

waypipe is a proxy for Wayland[0] clients. It forwards Wayland messages and serializes changes to shared memory buffers over a single socket. This makes application forwarding similar to ssh -X [1] feasible.

[0] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/ [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/OpenSSH#X11_forwarding