Howdy Selfhosters!
A family member who does not live in my state recently got a new PC, and asked for my help in setting it up. Since it can’t be done in person, I’ll have to do this over the phone. Problem is, I don’t really want to walk them through all of the steps (download Firefox, ublock origin, uninstall W11 bloat, etc) over the phone. I was hoping there exists a software that I could host on my Linux machine (I am able to port forward/host externally if necessary), and instruct them over the phone to download the “other end” (client-side) of the software so that I can remote in and set their PC up myself.
I checked out the awesome-selfhosted list and found that most of the remote access softwares are mainly for SSH servers. I did check out Guacamole, but I’m not sure I understand how to utilize the software. Any help and suggestions are welcome. Thank you everyone!
RustDesk is not 100% open source, it has closed source parts. It has installed suspicious certificates.
We investigated on using it on critical infrastructure, and decided that cannot use it because of these issues.
I dug into this, and it looks like it has been fixed: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/6444#discussioncomment-12039260 , and no longer does that.
So Rustdesk can be used entirely open source (since the proprietary management web UI is not critical), and it no longer installs certs.
So maybe it had problems a while ago, but it looks clean in these regards now.