[Gloucs] Administration of home computer

[Glyn Davies]

Steve Greig wrote:

> Hi All,
> thanks very much for your helpful suggestions. It is quite a long term 
> project for me but I am definitely keen to pursue it and will get 
> googling using your advice as a starting point. Also, thanks for 
> comments about thread hijacking and also top-posting. I am afraid I 
> plead guilty to both these but will reform from now on. When I had a 
> look at my dad's computer it turned out that the only problem was that 
> he had inadvertantly hidden the address toolbar on his browser and 
> that was enough to stop him in his tracks. I got it back and explained 
> how he can do that himself in future. As a matter of interest would 
> the type of PuTTY / ssh approach you are suggesting actually allow me 
> to make a change like that to his browser or are there limits to what 
> I would be able to change on his computer remotely?
> Best wishes from Steve

Steve,

As Dave has said, the X forwarding in ssh will meet your needs. However, 
as I said earlier, X isn't great over home user Internet connections. by 
using vnc over ssh you will speed this up (in truth, remove the X 
protocol from the Internet connection). To solve your father's mozilla 
problem you would ssh over the Internet to his machine (switching on X 
forwarding and compression). You would then run vncviewer on your 
father's machine pointing it at your father's machine (localhost) and 
get your own desktop via a vncserver. That desktop will appear on your 
machine as a window and would look as if your were sat infront of your 
father's machine. You could then su to your father's account and run 
mozilla and see what's broken. I can't think of many changes you 
wouldn't be able to make with ssh/vnc.


-- 
Best Regards
Glyn Davies