MonadLUG last night: 11-May-2006: Ted Roche: Remote access to heterogeneous computers

[Ted Roche]

Nine attendees met last night in Peterborough for the monthly  
MonadLUG meeting. We reviewed upcoming events from the main  
gnhlug.org web site front page, Looked over the pictures from  
Hosstraders, and talked about some ongoing projects, like by-laws and  
re-habbing older computers. Guy Pardoe emceed the meeting. Guy also  
asked for some future topics. Rich, our semi-regular attendee from  
Toronto, suggested MythTV, a pretty popular request. Ted asked for a  
session (maybe a mini-demo) on 'screen' and another on NX (http:// 
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology).

Ted's presentation dovetailed with the great materials presented by  
Ken D'Ambrosio on OpenVPN and Bill Stearn's on ssh. Rather than dig  
into the details or cover all of the aspects of security or  
implementation, Ted focused on the practical "How do I screen scrape  
a client's screen or a remote server?" Ted develops database and LAMP  
applications for small- and medium-sized businesses. He showed how to  
use a terminal window on his Ubuntu laptop to remotely access the  
development server at his business. Building on that, he redirected  
various ports to remotely and securely access the web server and  
Webmin server on that machine to view LAMP apps in development,  
maintain a database with phpMyAdmin, or maintain the server using  
WebMin. Finally, he combined this with redirecting ports within his  
business LAN (but not on the ssh server) so that he could remotely  
access other services inside his firewall, using VNC to view the  
desktop of his iMac.

As is usual in these events, discussion was lively and ranged near  
and far (wireless access, choices of desktops and distros,...) . A  
lot of good ideas were kicked around. Thanks to all for  
participating, to Guy for moderating the meeting and to Ken for  
providing us with the facilities.

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com