Remote control of desktop

[Lance DeVooght]

Michael,

If I understand you correctly, then, yes that sounds like it may work.
However, cobbling all of those pieces together and automating it
with scripts will take a considerable amount of study on my part.
I am not a new Linux user, but I have not worked with ssh and VNC,
not having had a need. 

Never the less, I do have a DynDNS account (that I haven't been using)
and I don't mind a challenge. So, I'll probably jump in and give it a try.

A few questions though please?

You say, "I have the laptop ssh to my home system and do a remote forward."
I'm not sure what all of that means, but then you seem to contradict it 
with, "For your mom you'd probably want to forward to her VNC port which is
5900, I think."
In addition, you describe doing ssh forwarding on your, "Host home,"  not 
your laptop. Why?

And, why do you do the whole, "RemoteForward 2222 localhost:22" thing?
I mean, what's the point of port 2222?


Thank you very much,

Lance


Michael Hirsch wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Lance DeVooght <cyborghunter at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I want to be able to remotely login to her laptop and control her
>> desktop. That way I can fix any problems she runs into, such as the need
>> to install a new application. I could also use it to walk her through any
>> operation that she is unfamiliar with.
> 
> I do this all the time.  I have a dyndns address for my home system.
> I have the laptop ssh to my home system and do a remote forward.  You
> can do it on the ssh commandline, or put it in your .ssh/config file
> like I do:
> Host home
>      User myuser
>      Hostname my.dyndns.address
>      RemoteForward 2222 localhost:22
> so now when I connect to port 2222 on my home machine it ends up going
> to port 22 on my laptop.
> 
> For your mom you'd probably want to forward to her VNC port which is
> 5900, I think.
> 
> So you'd want to create a script for you mom that starts a VNC server
> in the background, then ssh's to your home system and port forwards
> from your home port 5900 to her port 5900.  Create a desktop icon for
> this script so she just has to click it.
> 
> Then after she does that, you would vnc to localhost:0 which would get
> forward3ed to her vnc server and voila!  You are controlling her
> desktop.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Michael