Recently, someone in my family was not able to get into their home PC with their password, and called for assistance. This means having to drive down to the machine to see what they are doing, and log in with the appropriate account that can reset that password. Work commitments preclude driving there right away to see what is happening, and I am trying to locate a remote access solution. If they were logged into the machine, I could use some sort of remote assistance tool, but that is not an option in this case. There is the possibility of setting up SSH or OpenVPN to access the machine via the Internet, but I am not certain leaving those tools running all the time is the smartest idea in this day and age.
What recommendations do the Soylent community have for securely managing a machine over the Internet when someone is not logged into it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @04:56PM
Closed source and proprietary are two huge strikes against Teamviewer, I agree. For Windows users, it's three primary draws are its generally good behavior (sans new popup ads), it's ease and cleanliness of installation (allowing for manual tweaking to keep it from always running), and it's third-party server relaying to overcome all manner of unexplored network shennanigans one might see in a home or non-profit environment.
A VPN to an open-source VNC server under my own control really should be the approach I look at next.