Installing A SSH Server - Accessing your computer remotely

Imagine this - you are at an important meeting, and need to show some spreadsheets to your boss, but you realise you have forgotten the files at home! There is no time to go back, since that would take you at least an hour, so what else can you do?

Why not just access your own computer from the Internet?

Remote desktop is a concept that allows you to control one computer from the other, and this has been used for some time. However, setting up such system can prove to be somewhat complicated. Luckily, if you are running Linux on your home desktop, it's doesn't have to be

I'll start with one acronym - SSH. SSH stands for Secure Shell, which is a protocol regularly used by web masters who need to access their web server (ComputingHost has it in its offer, of course). But this doesn't mean you cannot use it on your own computer.

The main idea I will deal with here is installing a SSH server on your Linux machine, and accessing it from another. I have done this on Ubuntu 7.10, so this is what my instructions will revolve around. Nevertheless, I am sure you all realise that different Linux distributions aren't at all that different, so the process should be pretty much the same for everyone.

The first things you will need is a SSH server. The package you are looking for is called openssh-server. There are several ways you can install it - I have used Synaptic Package Manager. Once installed, the SSH server will listen at port 22 for incoming connections. If you are the only one who will use this server, it might be a good idea to change the port number. To do so, you need to edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file (what you are looking for will be near the top), and then restart the server: sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Now, since we've got the server running the way we want to, we can connect to it - use whatever program you find the best. If you need to know your IP address, head over to http://www.whatismyip.com/.

Oh, wait! Not working? There is one thing that is usually the problem... Port forwarding. If you are using a router to connect to the Internet, you probably need to tell it what ports to open. Your router's address is usually 192.168.1.1, so go in there and allowing incoming connections at port XXXX (which you assigned to the SSH server).

If you still can't access it... There must be some other, more complicated problems. If you can - use it wisely

 

 

 

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Of course, doing that way you open a ssh command-line access, it's not fully what we call a "remote desktop access".
Are you planning to go further on that way ? Unless being satisfied with the possibility of running Linux command-lines only ?

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Yup, my server is completely managed via SSH. The difference between my setup and your setup is that I run FreeBSD 7.1. It's so easy to manage as a server. For FreeBSD, SSH is preinstalled, you just need to activate it and off you go.

deltatux

 

 

 

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Yes, I did forget to mention that this isn't actually "remote desktop" But you are not limited only to command-line access - you can also access the server (i.e. your computer) through many different programs, some of which offer a simple way to manipulate files.

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I agree. You can even get/put files using the ssh facility in FileZilla.

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Actually, you can indeed have "remote desktop", it's called X forwarding, it's part of the SSH protocol. However, the implementation like almost everything in UNIX is not universal. So you need to do some research for your server. All you need is to install the X window system and a preferred desktop system and off you go, remote desktop!

xboxrulz

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