Connect two remote computers
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I am looking for a way to connect to e.g. my mothers computer (Linux Mint) in another part of the country, so I can help her with technical issues. I need a remote desktop solution, so that I can see and show what I do.
Neither computer is on a network with a static ip address. If necessay, static ips can be bought, but I would like to avoid that.
Is there a (simple) workaround?
Can I set up a direct connection without static ips?
Can I setup a rented VPS (e.g. at Hetzner), which both computers can connect to, allwing me to access the other computer?
I am a translator!
Previously, I was doing that with my mother's and my aunt's computers that did not even have a public IPv4 when connected to the network. My solution was to have autossh-tunnel making a reverse ssh tunnel to a VPS.
However, my mother now has a connection with a public IPv4 address, and even a fixed one, so I stopped doing that. My aunt has a connection with a public IPv4 address but not fixed. I have a domain registered at OVH, which allows configuring a dynamic DNS host, ddupdate runs on my aunt's computer (running Trisquel) and it updates the addess, so I can access it with a fixed name.
In my ~/.ssh/config, I have something like (I replaced my mother's name with alice)
Host alice-vnc Hostname mother.mydomain Port 5432 User alice LocalForward 5900 localhost:5900 RemoteCommand x11vnc -localhost -display :0
5432 (I don't use this number) is the port that the ISP routeur fowards to port 22 of my mother's computer (this needs to be configured on the routeur). "User alice" is for the username to connect as, I have put a public ssh key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on her computer, and I disabled password authentication. I run "ssh alice-vnc" in one terminal and "gvncviewer localhost:0" in another terminal, then I get the remote display to her computer.
If you have more interest with the solution via a VPS, I can try configuring it again (at some point, it wasn't working and it was faster to configure with the hostname than find out my mistake).
By the way, I also configured access via TOR, but I only used it for a connection by terminal, I don't know whether it would work for vnc, I could try it. The benefit of going via TOR is that you don't need any assistance of a VPS.
RustDesk is one of the easiest solutions. The server portion can be self hosted. https://directory.fsf.org/wiki?title=RustDesk&oldid=87589