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How do you Remotely Manage the Family's Computers?

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

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @11:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @11:20PM (#502040)

    You didn't understand my comment. What I meant was: it seems odd that someone wouldn't be permitted or trusted to have the root/Administrator password to administer his/her own computer. The asker knew the root/Administrator password, but seemingly didn't consider providing it to the owner of the computer. See the part about "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"?

    Any child over the age or 3 or so likely has better intuition about how to deal with computers and other modern tech than a 70+ year old family member.

    Given unsupervised physical access, it doesn't take much cleverness to find a bootable ISO that has chntpw, and gain access to an Administrator account on Windows. It takes less to find a bootable ISO and use it as a live CD. A child could do it. As for elderly people, even if they are forgetful or incompetent, we usually trust them to handle their own affairs. In either case, I question the value of keeping the root/Administrator password secret from the owner of the computer.