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Re: [LUG] Remote Login

 

Henry Bremridge wrote:
> Am off to India for a month where I will need access to files on my desktop
> (debian etch) while there: including openoffice files

VNC's great, but unless you can guarantee low latency and a reasonable 
pipe, it'll be laggy. You can speed it up a lot, but it gets annoying 
real quick.

I would go the scp/ssh route. For security, use

AllowUsers yourusername

in /etc/ssh/sshd_config , so that unless somebody knows your username, 
or the username you use for this, they won't get in. Obviously, disallow 
root logins with

PermitRootLogin no

Is a must for all machines. The vast majority of ssh compromises come 
from people guessing commonly used user and user/pass combinations 
(guest accounts, root, system accounts etc).

Maybe once installed in India, if you find you have a static ip, you can 
tighten that security even more by only allowing your remote ip access 
to port 22 at the router. (Note, you can improve security more by using 
another port, this will stop you registering on a casual common port-scan).

> From this computer I access a couple of other computers via ssh, I presume
> that if I ssh into this computer then I use this computer to access the
> others. Unless this is a security problem?

Very usable, I do that myself. You may find latency an issue with 
bouncing around the world unless the other computers are nearby your 
home one.

>     My initial thought would be to burn a copy of PuppyLinux /
>     DamnSmallLinux. Use that to set up a ssh session and then access my
>     desktop. This will work for email, calender and IM. I cannot find a
>     console program to read openoffice files
>     Problems: Neither of these have openoffice as standard. This would
>     therefore mean that either I copy the files across, save it to another
>     computer over there and then access the file or I forward the X session
>     across
> 
> Thought 2
> 
>     Get a CD Live version of Ubuntu and run that. For the openoffice files,
>     either scp the files across and run those or use Openoffice to open the
>     files over an ssh tunnel (not sure how)

Thought 3. If client has Windows installed and policy says you can't 
replace:

putty.exe (Ubiquitous ssh client for windows. Free.)
filezilla (GUI scp client, lovely. Free.)
Openoffice for win32. (Free)

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