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posted by martyb on Sunday April 30 2017, @01:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the Ask-Soylent dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday April 30 2017, @09:53PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday April 30 2017, @09:53PM (#502014) Homepage

    The best thing to do is to give them something like ChromeOS where you don't have to manage it. Everything is in the cloud, you don't have to worry about backups, you don't have to worry about viruses for the most part, if the machine breaks you can get it repaired or replaced since all of your data is in the cloud, the hardware is interchangeable. Pre-packaged apps are provided through a controlled app store, and most things are web apps now anyway.

    Of course you sacrifice some privacy (depending on how much you trust Google with your aunt's cat photos), but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

    From what I've heard from my younger sibling, schools are adopting ChromeOS for the cheap price and ease of management. I expect the "think of the children" folk will (have already?) weed out any glaring privacy issues.

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