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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: 2) by turgid on Sunday April 30 2017, @08:53PM
Is that still a thing? My father used to swear by it, even though VNC and SSL had been about for several years. Then he'd spend hours on the phone ranting about all the trouble he'd had remotely accessing the servers...
He's retired at last, and he reckons he's going to give this newfangled Linux technology a try one of these days. I put Mandrake on his laptop for him in 2001 IIRC but logging in with a username and a password was "so old-fashioned."
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].