Now we'll move on to Remote Assistance in the GUI environment. Now the only way I have explored doing this requires guru to know noob's password so that he can login via ssh as noob. This is because noob owns the display on his machine when he is logged in and no one else can run an application that attaches to noob's active disply except for him. There are other ways to get around this, I'm sure, but this one is super easy, and if you are helping noob out, then noob might not mind changing his password temporarily with the command

passwd

while you help him and then changing it back once you log out as to protect his usual password.

In this one noob just changes his password temporarily, calls guru with the new password and asks for help. Guru then runs the command

ssh -L5900:localhost:5900 noob@noobs.machine.net x11vnc -display :0

in one terminal window. This logs into noobs machine as noob and forwards port 5900 (VNC) to guru's machine port 5900. Now, on guru's machine localhost:5900 looks like noob's port 5900, where his vnc server is running. The x11vnc line runs x11vnc (a vnc server that exports the current X session) pointing at :0 (relative to noob's machine) which is his first monitor. Now guru runs his favorite vnc client and connects to localhost. My favorite is the simplistic xtightvncviewer so the command is

xtightvncviewer localhost

Guru should see a vnc window with noobs display pop up. Now, to communicate with noob, if you don't want to talk on the phone, use skype, etc., you could open up some graphical text editor and just type back and forth in there. This also serves the purpose of noob having a log of your chat for future reference if he just saves the text when you're done.

This method is pretty simple and insecure, but it works easily. There are many other options out there which I hope to cover in a future PCLug meeting. Maybe we can even write some more scripts around automating these apps. This is an area in Linux where I haven't seen a lot of nice GUI wrappers, but with these nice tools, the environment is ripe for a really polished GUI tool.