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.
I use Parsec. I used Chrome Remote Desktop in the past, which was good; I’ve used Splashtop which was amazing too.
Parsec is good enough that I can remote play games on my computer from work without much of a delay. It’s designed for gaming, so I rarely if ever have any issues with video corruption or not displaying a piece of software.
You can just make a remote-in account, set up 2FA (it’s TOTP based, not SMS crap) and log in both places – his machine will just show up for you to connect to whenever he wants help.
As far as I’m aware, it supports Windows and Mac hosting.
If you already have a pi over there, a PiKVM would be a good choice too - in case you needed to reboot/access bios settings, etc too.
Those all sound promising. Chrome Remote Desktop sounds like the easiest for him since he’s most comfortable with Google things. Thanks!