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On 02/04/2020 19:29, comrade meowski wrote:
On 02/04/2020 12:09, Martin Gautier wrote:Hi What are people using for remote access and remote control these days?I used to use Teamviewer quite reliably but have found they've slowly lost the plot. I don't use it often so their version backwards compatibility issues hit me nearly every time I need to fire it up and now that they've changed their free tier option it's pretty much unusable for me.I've had a go at Google Remote Admin but that seems to have a problem with Linux & nVidia causing a login loop - so that's out.My criteria: Free Cross platform Can access Windows Active Domain members without being in the domainThis particular never-ending problem has obviously moved right up the priority queue in the last month or so for me as well. For years I've had a constantly changing list of crappy solutions and nasty software for this and I imagine you'll be all too familiar with most of them yourself. Open source self-hosted secure cross-platform swiss army knife of arbitrary desktop connections+sharing? I've spent most of today looking at exactly the same issue in the vain hope I can set up something for this exact job.Let's completely discount _all_ 3rd party brokered connections: teamviewer, logmein, google remote admin, anydesk, etc etc. No proprietary crap, must be entirely self-hosted and open source. As you say _must_ be capable of setting up and tearing down arbitrary desktop sessions to new non-technical users with minimal hand holding over the internet (i.e.; the normal scenario is the worst scenario).All enterprisey and paid stuff is also out - this sector is price-gouged to the maxed and there is nothing worth the asking price. So free/open source it is.So the progress I've made so far is to settle on testing this: https://www.meshcommander.com/meshcentral2 https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentralAnd so far I'd cautiously say... not bad. Reminds me a bit of reversed Guacamole. It has enough promise for me to seriously invest time in properly implementing and field testing it for the next couple of days at least and nothing else has got this far.In brief, it's a websockets server in nodejs (ugh, but beggars can't be choosers). Simple enough to get running on a linux box - which could easily be on a cloud server - but I have running on a local Ubuntu VM, quick and dirty. Once you're logged in as admin to the local control interface you can knock up groups/users and generate some simple preseeded packages that you send to the end user. Like sending users pre-generated VNC reverse-connection files to come back to your listening instance I guess.I've tested a Win10 Pro, MacOS Catalina and a couple of random linux systems as the "remote" clients - all within my LAN for now - and honestly, it's hard to fault it so far. Polished and slick it's not but it works surprisingly well and as a current hot project (it's getting a lot of interest on Reddit etc) and your typical github-based hackjob there are probably a lot of improvements and goodies to profit from once you invest the time to learn and set it up properly.The Good: ticks all your boxes free/open source and highly active github project self-hosted surprisingly easy to at least get up and running easy for inviting in and initiating first connection to arbitrary hosts offers "connect once" and "install agent" options to end users provides pre-login access to win10 via agent install - very useful Google authenticator for 2FA option The Bad: docker support is a mess, next job is containerize it for production running behind a reverse-proxy also looks like a headache letsencrypt support combined with the above two is gonna be... tricky (these are all fixable and are very much my problem as a sysadmin) The Ugly: the interface yuck (but who cares) bloody npm agh god why The ZOMG:somehow it offers Intel AMT integration and control. I'll test that with one of my vPro laptops later.Hope that's helpful - I'm pretty pleased so far with progress, now I just need it integrated into the rest of my infrastructure and dockerized+reverse-proxied to the live internet and I think I may _finally_ be able to shitcan teamviewer and all the rest forever.
Blinking Flip. That's awesome! The exact thing I wanted. Nice find.That will get me through the current pile of outstanding support calls and a nice little project to build a stand-alone system for my clients in the long term.
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