Johnathon, et al, In your post from Thursday you mention you have OpenVPN installed to provide remote access etc.
In Rob's case he doesn't appear against this but worried about connections to his own private network. Do you know if you can set up an OpenVPN server on a hosting site, no direct connection to home network, but then either SSH to the OpenVPN server and thence onto the client, or through some VNC equivilant? About a year or two ago, discussions were held here about providing some sort of support package from the UK loco, but got bogged down for one reason or another. This idea of setting up a hosted VPN server could be a way to provide the remote support that we were finding difficult to arrange. I briefly looked at OpenVPN quite some time ago for remote access to my brother's Windlows laptop as he was having lots of various problems - it went puff before I got any further with the idea. Anyone fancy trying to set up such a project to see if it both works and is workable? Maybe set up a server at someones place for testing purposes, and if all works well there see if those nice people at Bitfolk, or whoever does the podcast mirrors, could loan us an account for a period of time whilst trials go on? Or maybe a bit of space on a Cononical server? If all works out, extend the server capabilities to host an iPBX and a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool like SugarCRM, I think, and an instant Ubuntu Support Service is formed. Now if you really wanted to get onto the bandwagon, get a duplicate setup in the States, Europe and elsewhere connected together and hey presto! something that no one else has but is cost effective and a real boon to the Community. Hmm, better stop there, beginning to go the realms of fantasy! It'd certainly make things a lot easier to do as there wouldn't be problems with security, bandwidth or such like. Discuss! Ian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]on Behalf Of Rob Beard Sent: 16 January 2009 10:59 To: British Ubuntu Talk Subject: Re: [ubuntu-uk] Remote support was Sad but true? From the Register On 16/01/2009 01:25, Simon Wears wrote: > My family run Windows XP. I'll have a look into that, thank you for > the link! Setting it up wouldn't be too difficult, my mum gets how to > use a computer and is fairly good at fixing them with simple things, > this is more for the advanced stuff that explaining to her just makes > her utterly confused. > > I recently got myself an iPhone, so I could attempt to use it as a 3G > modem, possibly. Unfortunately, she isn't running Ubuntu yet, but > eventually I'll get her to switch. I'm just waiting for Windows to > kill itself (again) then I can put Ubuntu on it for a week, and she > can decide if she wants to switch. > You're welcome. I'd be interested to know if anyone has managed to remote into an Ubuntu box running on a Vodafone 3G mobile broadband link. I have a customer who is currently on Windows (not legit either by the looks of things) and I have said that they might be worth giving Ubuntu a try as their existing copy is screwed. I'm going to loan them a machine for a week so they can give it a try although it would be handy if I could connect in remotely. I'm just not sure what the options would be. I'm not keen on the idea of setting up OpenVPN so they connect into my network, I just wondered if Vodafone give out real IP addresses and allow certain ports through? If anyone has any other ideas (or a link to the OpenVPN method) that would be ideal. Ta, Rob -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/ -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
