Help with setting up SSH Tunnel - NEWBIE ALERT!!!

[mcasavant]

Esteemed Mac Geniuses,
I am wanting to remotely control a Mac OSX (Tiger) machine at work with a PC at home. I found this explanation: (http://howto.diveintomark.org/download/HOWTO use your Mac from anywhere - desktop edition.mp4),
which seemed great, until about a third of the way through...

When I typed in "ssh-keygen -l -f /etc/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub", I got an error message that said "No such file or directory". Unfortunately, the video doesn't tell me how to handle this error, and I'm not smart enough to figure it out.

Can someone give me clear, step-by-step directions to get me back on track?

Or perhaps there's a different way to control the Mac altogether (this is for a photo editing application, so speed is imperative - I tried www.LogMeIn.com and it was WAY too slow)...

Thanks in advance!

Mike

 

[belvdr]

Does your work allow for VPN connections (essentially what SSH is going to get you)? If so, you can just concentrate on remote control software.

Even when/if you get SSH to work, you'll still need remote control software, such as VNC (it is slow too).

 

[mcasavant]

belvdr,
The short answer is "Probably".

It is a personal Mac computer at a photographer's studio. She too is not a computer genius, so she'll pretty much let me do anything I want to her machine, lol. Her photos reside on her HD and I am the graphical editor. I want to be able to go through the thousands of pics from home, instead of going into her studio.

I know nothing about setting up a VPN connection (server side and/or client side), what software it requires, or any other technical considerations.

On your other point, the instructional video does recommend using VNC once the SSH tunnel is established.

Can I use VNC even without an SSH tunnel? How vulnerable would the Mac be without setting up the tunnel? In the real world, what is the risk when only she and I know that the connection can be made, and I'm always doing it from my one PC at home??

Thanks again!

 

[milk242]

generate your ssh keys in the /etc/ directory instead of /etc/ssh

and tunneling is just a way to tunnel any specific traffic such as vnc traffic through the ssh protocol. Yes you can use vnc without an SSH and to make it as secure as possible without SSH, you can change the default ports and a good password (not sure if vnc sends the password via cleartext)

 

[angelwatt]

Can I use VNC even without an SSH tunnel? How vulnerable would the Mac be without setting up the tunnel? In the real world, what is the risk when only she and I know that the connection can be made, and I'm always doing it from my one PC at home??

It can be, but not recommended (passwords sent as plain text). You may be the only ones that know about it right now, but there are bots around that are scanning machines and checking for certain ports and such on random machines. I had machine hacked once through VNC because I left the server running. It's a little funny watching someone control your machine.

As for the command, just do the command part first, it will then give you an options to save it somewhere and name it.

[COLOR="Blue"]ssh-keygen -l -f[/COLOR]
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/cantin/.ssh/id_rsa): [COLOR="Blue"]/etc/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub[/COLOR]

Somethings to look at
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/networking_security/sshtunnel.html
http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=683785
http://blog.acmelab.org/2008/07/20/mac-os-x-openvpn-bridge-ssh-tunnel-vpn-goodness/