remotessh

Configure a remote connection through ssh.

Teamviewer is great, but under some circumstances it's not possible:

• low-bandwidth - waiting for the screen to show is sloooow
• IoT-devices where it's not installable

Other solutions like VPN might be too difficult to install.

I struggled mostly with the first point and searched for a long time a way to access a compter remotely through ssh. Because the sharing-feature of Macs or opening a ssh-port under Linux doesn't work through NAT, remotessh solves the problem by connecting to a server:

Remote computer ---->  public server  <---- control computer

sshd listening on      can connect          needs access to
port 2222              to remote computer   public server
ssh port-forwarding    through port 2222
to server

On the control-computer, you initialize the keys:

./scripts/install.sh user@host

And then you zip the whole directory and send it to your 'remote computer'. Now your friend unzips it and runs either

./scripts/start_remote.sh

or double-clicks on the start_remote.scpt if he has a Mac. Now you can connect to your public server and run

./connect_remote.sh

And voila, you're connected to the remote computer via ssh.

Security

This gives access to your public server to the user from the remote computer. Each time you run install.sh, a new keypair is created for the remote computer, and the public server has the public key installed in its authorized_keys.