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On 26/02/14 21:47, Martin Gautier wrote: > Hi > > Does anyone have experience of using Empathy to share desktops between > computers? > > I have 2 Ubuntu 13.10 systems both running Empathy connected to > jabber.org.uk accounts. Using Empathy, you're supposed to be able to > right-click a contact and select "Share Desktop". It uses Vino & Vinagre. > > I have success one way only - ie. I can share one computers desktop but > on the other computer the option is greyed out. Manually connecting via > Vinagre works fine so I know the "back-end" stuff is in place and working. > > The reason I want to do it via Empathy is for remote support - one > computer is destined to be remote and by using a jabber account, you can > get around the router firewall & port forwarding issues in the same way > Teamviewer does... > > Anyone got any suggestions for tweaking Empathy? There doesn't seem to > be a lot of options :( > > Cheers > > Martin > I'm afraid I know almost nothing about any of those programs, but I have a handy trick for getting round the annoying NAT/router/firewall issues when supporting remote machines. It will be easier for you because you're getting to set up the remote box before it's delivered, and it's running Linux already, both of which will make life easier. Either instruct the remote user to copy/paste a single command that you will send them via email, or leave a shell script somewhere easy for them to double click when required (or set up a trigger to fire on a particularly formatted email/IM, cron job, etc, etc). Reverse SSH tunnelling is awesome. The remote box with one command SSH's to you on a set port, you SSH into that port on your local machine and immediately traverse back through the tunnel to login to their system: perfect NAT traversal. With a little more work you can combine this with the usual X-forwarding and proxying tricks and do things like start the remote firefox locally, at which point you can login to their router from inside their network and reconfigure the port forwarding and other barriers to normal NAT>NAT direct connections. A perhaps easier - and cross platform - solution is to configure the remote box with VNC to dial out to you, and have your VNC client in listening mode. You can even just email or dropbox a portable, pre-configured VNC binary to the most clueless of remote Windows users without access to SSH, etc: as long as you've got all the port forwarding and so on at your end set up properly (and either a static IP or a dynamic DNS service of some kind) you can definitely punch through NATs without having to rely on any kind of third party authentication service like TeamViewer. Unsurprisingly I wouldn't touch anything that requires an intermediary brokering party for secure information with a barge pole, and have always done it this way. I'm sure that's not what you wanted at all, but hopefully it might be useful at some point. Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq