My father is 75 and not very capable on a computer. He’s got an old MacBook Air at home behind a typical ISP router for which he has no access controls (so no port forwarding).

My immediate need is actually not his machine at all, but the Raspberry Pi I installed at his house before I left the country and forgot to enable cron on so it’s not doing what I need yet. However, it would be really nice if I could also do one of the following as well:

  • VNC (or something) into his computer whenever something “isn’t working” rather than doing the talk-him-through-it dance over Skype.
  • Install a new OS (the Mac is no longer supported by MacOS). I don’t know how plausible this is though.

My current plan is to email him a shell script that should create a reverse SSH tunnel to a server in Montréal or something and then I can shell into his Mac through there. It’s not ideal though since we’re still talking shell scripts and he’s easily frustrated.

I know that in Windows land there are all sorts of tools scammers use to take over a machine remotely. Does Mac allow for the same thing? Note that I only have Linux machines available to me on this side of the Atlantic.

  • TCB13@lemmy.world
    31·
    20 days ago

    Can’t you use RustDesk? It’s free and you can have the thing setup and staring with the OS on the background. Then you can access from your computer without the need for a SSH tunnel with just a user and password. Don’t overcompicate things