I’ve been using RealVNC for family computer help and have been wanting to setup a self hosted replaced for a while now, but haven’t had the time. RealVNC has recently axed their free levels, so I’ll use it as a reason to setup a self hosted solution.
Ideally it would be something like a web page (I have a domain and reverse proxy) where family can go, get a code or a software to run, which will then let me control their system securely.
I was considering guacamole on a pi at each location I’m likely to have to support, but this doesn’t help when family is away from their home network on laptop.
What is out there for this? Have you used it? What are your experiences?
Thanks
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I use Rustdesk for 99% of my remote desktop needs (RealVNC only for my Raspberry Pi).
I will add that self-hosting Rustdesk makes it reliable and fast. When I use the public servers, it was not a good experience.
I’m running it off my Synology NAS through docker.
Haven’t used it myself but you could give https://rustdesk.com/ a try.
If you have used AnyDesk in the past, this gives the same experience. Recently used it and has a lot of features, including unattended access.
They recommend self hosting an instance for better performance.
I have always preferred TightVNC over the various other VNC flavours. It does only one thing, but does it well, with minimal setup and network requirements.
I have tried RustDesk recently, and the performance when it worked was nice. But I found it too complex to set up across more than a few machines, and ultimately unreliable, with connections failing without any useful error message, an unresponsive relay, weird certificate errors, etc… It needs a couple of years to mature.
I would suggest looking into using WireGuard to wire your various networks and computers together. It works very well most platforms. You can easily give laptops a road-warrior connection, so they always phone home. Then it doesn’t matter where they are.
Your requirements sound a lot like Chrome Remote Desktop and it’s pretty trivial to install, which might be a handy thing for family members that aren’t tech-savvy.
Since it’s family, go Tailscale (mesh network).
There’s a couple ways to use it:
You can run the client on every machine, so they’re all members of your mesh net. Easily access any of them from anywhere, at any time, using whatever remote utility you choose: VNC, RDP, Dameware, etc. You can easily map drives too, since your on the same LAN. (Just turn off MagicDNS - it can interfere with local name resolution).
You can run it on a single device in each location, enabling Subnet Routing, and that device will route traffic into the LAN on which it resides. I use a Raspberry Pi W Zero for this, and it works fine. I can print, configure my NAS, cable modem router, from anywhere. Q
I run the TS client on anything that can, Disable MagicDNS, set the TS network metric to 5000 (this pushes it’s routing priority way down, preventing accidental routes over TS when I’m home), and enable it to run as a service.
Worst case, if someone doesn’t want to run the client, you can setup Reverse VNC using your Tailscale network with the Funnel option enabled. This Funnels traffic into your network via an internet-exposed interface hosted by Tailscale (you can also host it yourself on a VPS).
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage VNC Virtual Network Computing for remote desktop access VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
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TacticalRMM is very comprehensive, self hosted, but more geared towards organizations managing a fleet of machines.
I turn Tailscale on at their computers and ask them to turn on VNC when I need to assist them on the desktop. Or you can use anything else, there’s plenty of remote desktop apps once you waive the security requirement (because it’s private anyway due to Tailscale).
Rustdesk or Teamviewer https://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/linux/
Rustdesk ia great and almoat feature to feature with teamviewer. Rustdesk has some non opensource code portions and some have speculated that the contributors could be chinese state actors, etc. But TV is proprietary…so…
There is still the real vnc lite version btw. 3 machines
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