Hopefully you remember GNU screen from PCLug Meeting 14. Well, today we are going to use screen to do some remote assistance, my favorite way, on the command line. We are going to setup a screen session which multiple people can connect to.

First of all we need screen and ssh installed on all machines involved. It's as easy as

apt-get install screen ssh

or just use your distro's package manager or GUI if you aren't running a Debian based distro. I strongly suggest looking back at the slides if you aren't familiar with screen.

We'll refer to the user receiving assistance as noob and the user giving assistance as guru.. So to help noob out we need to first setup his computer. You can either go to noob's house and setup his computer/router or you can talk him through it over the phone, but either way, here's what has to be setup.

• setup router to forward ssh connections (port 22) to the target machine
• install screen and ssh on the target machine
• set suid on noob's screen installation "chmod +s /usr/bin/screen; chmod 755 /var/run/screen" on Debian based distros as root
• create a user account for yourself on the target machine (use a strong password for noob's safety)
• give noob some icon on his desktop to start the session

Now we'll go through a session that we setup manually (no scripting) so that we better understand our problem and subsequently the scripts we need to write to automate it.

noob's machine

screen -S assistance
ctrl-a :multiuser on
ctrl-a :acladd guru