Remotely Update - an Update on an open source, free alternative to TeamViewer, Anydesk, GoToAssist..

[Music] hey triple source advocate and i'm back with another video and i'm going to cover a topic that actually covered last year uh you know pretty around this time maybe i don't know um but i was looking for a solution that would give me an alternative to using something like team viewer or any desk or go to assist or any of those other things that you know you know trust is is a big thing to me as you guys should know by now i love to self-host things and i was i've been looking for something for years and people would always say vnc well vnc is okay don't get me wrong but vnc it's hard to send a file to someone and then have them be able to let me connect to them without doing port forwarding and some other stuff and i know there's some options to do that but a lot of them were windows only kind of options and it it just made it tricky to get them going so i was really looking for something similar to teamviewer or any desk but something that was open source and self-hosted and so i posted on the self-hosted reddit and somebody pointed out remotely and at the time he mentioned hey just be aware the developer said he's going to be taking a break for a little while and this is the developer jared he's he's he he does just tons and tons of work on this project and he does you know slow down and take breaks now and then i think he's got a full-time job um so this is a this is a side project for him but he's really awesome he has just been tremendous in answering questions when i had him he has a space out on reddit as well but this is the github space and you can see there's issues he looks at issues and takes them on and you can see 16 days you know a few days a few months so he makes updates fairly regular i mean but you can see that there's some changes he's been going through a lot of change lately with this uh project so last year when i showed her it it had a very different user interface um so so he's going to um you know updating the interface but he says the repo is on pause so i'm gonna again put it out there he he puts it on pause as he needs to this is just one of those things when you make a big project that gets popular sometimes you have to stop and take time for yourself so you know understand it's out there and it functions but he'll work on it as he has time um and he does i see him get out there and do things but be aware it's out there but i wanted to talk about it because he has changed the user interface a little bit so if you go to remotely.1 you can kind of test it out and see how it goes you can try to use it you can send people to it and tell them you know go get the desktop app and then give me the key and i can get connected and it's really a cool project so i've got my own version of it set up but i want to go through the setup with you guys today because it's really not too complicated but it does take a little bit of experience i do suggest so there's two ways to run this you can run this on bare metal and if you're gonna run on a vps i highly recommend just running it bare metal on the vps i hate say bare metal on vps because it's already a virtual machine but i highly recommend just running it installed on the operating system there but there is also a docker application for it that's been created and it works well i've installed it in in the past and used it so there's two ways to do this today i'm going to show both of those ways so if you want to jump to one or the other feel free i'll put time time stamps down in the show notes but first we're going to go out we're actually just going to install it straight up on a vps i want to say thank you to all my patrons over at patreon and my subscribers on youtube thank you so much for all of your support i love doing this channel i love making this media and this content for you i hope you enjoy it as well i do post all of the videos now over at patreon after one of my patrons made the suggestion and i don't know why it didn't dawn on me before that but if you're interested in seeing them through patreon and getting notifications through patreon instead of through youtube or hoping that youtube's algorithms happens to show it to you jump over and become a supporter on patreon patreon.com i've got the links in the description and the show notes i appreciate your support thank you so much so we're going to go out to digitalocean that's my my vps that i prefer for testing stuff so once you're in digitalocean if you haven't signed up before just understand i do have an affiliate link down in the description that is something that will give me a credit but it also gives you a credit if you sign up for digitalocean using that link so you'll get a 50 credit for 30 or 60 days i don't remember exactly what it is but it gives you a chance to get out here and try their droplets which is what they call their virtual machines so when you go here if you go to create we'll go to a droplet it's pretty easy you pick the the the distribution you want and they've got several i always use ubuntu and 2004 is the latest lts long-term support so i just use that one when you go down here choose a plan so they have basic they have general purpose you know all these different things that you can click on i always click on this little left one here and then you see it changes to five dollars so i'm going to use a five dollar a month droplet so really really inexpensive so with that credit you could run like 10 10 of these things five of these you know and you can do the math so let me use a five dollar droplet and then pick a place that's geographically close to you so i'm gonna do that as well new york's fine i'm in the middle of the country in the united states so that's perfectly good and then if you have ssh keys you can upload those and name them so i'm just going to go ahead and use this one right here that's the machine i'm on and don't worry about that that's my public key so there's nothing you can do with it except give me access to something you probably wouldn't want me to have access to anyways and then here now you can name this this is going to create the host name of your of your virtual machine so i like to name it what i'm actually going to to use as the full url so i'm going to call this remote dot o s i a dot m e so os open source is awesome.me we'll just use that for now and then everything should be good i'm going to click create droplet and it's going to take just a second now i want to actually have remote.osia.me point to this droplet and it's going to get a public ip address intermittent so i'm going to go out to my registrar i'm going to go to godaddy.com so in order to get this to point to the server that i want i'm going to click on add right here under under the under the dns records and i'm going to go here and i'm going to pick an a record and i'm going to type in remote because that's the name that i used as the sub domain then i'm going to go back to digitalocean it should be done creating my droplet here and it is i'm going to copy that ip address and i'm just going to paste that right here and then with godaddy i just go to custom and then i just take out the three and that means in 10 minutes 600 seconds this should be ready to go so i just check and make sure remote is pointing to that ip address and it looks like it is which is great now from here we got to go command line a little bit here but that's cool we can do that that's no problem i'm going to resize this window so i'm going to ssh and it's going to be root at that ip address it's going to ask if i trust that key and i do and then it should have my ssh keys so i'm done now if you set it up with a password on digitalocean it'll prompt you for the password so just type in that password to get logged in i'm going to clear out the screen here i'm going to make the font a little bit bigger for you guys on mobile devices so the first thing i always do with any of my linux servers is i update and upgrade so you can do sudo oops if you spell it right sudo apt update and then two ampersands and then sudo apt upgrade dash y so that's going to go through and update the repositories and pull down the latest information that's available for this system and then it's going to go ahead and run through a quick upgrade to update all of the all the system files and everything like that and get it on the newest possible version that we can get for ubuntu 2004 all right after i finish upgrading everything i always like to let it reboot so we're doing that and i'm going to log right back in i'm going to try to use the url that we set up there we go everything looks like it's working there it should log me in all right so we're in now the first thing we need to do is go get the software that we want to run so we're going to go over to the github page here for remotely and i'll put these links in the description and in the show notes on how to do this and we're going to go over to this section that says releases just want to click into the latest release so you can see here it was may 19th so a little over a month ago from the date that i'm recording here and you want to go down and find the right installer so if you're going to run this on a windows server you want to get the serverinstaller.exe the linuxx64.zip if you want to kind of build it yourself and then the winx64.zip if you want to build it yourself and then of course there's source code if you want to build yourself as well but really if you're running on a linux server ubuntu server like me just just grab this one that has no extension you're going to right click you're just going to click on copy link we're going to go back to our terminal and we're going to use wget and then we're just going to paste that in and with with the terminal i always use ctrl shift and v like victor not c uh we'll do w get again ctrl shift v there we go and that paste what it paste whatever you have copied to the clipboard and you can see the version there so we're just going to hit go so that downloaded our installer and if we clear this and do a ls we can see there's our installer so now we're going to do chmod then we're going to say plus x which means make this executable and then we're going to start typing out the name of that and hit tab and it'll autofill and we're going to hit enter so we're going to change this to an executable file all right now we're just going to run that command that we just gave execute permissions and the first thing i'm going to ask is do you want to have this set up with your server already set in the download packages if you do you need to have a github account you'll have to set up a personal access token and do a few other things but for me i can easily tell my clients how to type in the url that they need in order to access my site so i'm not going to do that i'm just going to say i want to use the pre-built in this case if you don't if you want to have that other stuff done then then you then type no and you can go through and have it build up all the stuff for your server what directory i'm just going to use the one that he suggests slash far slash www slash remotely and then slash my server's public ip address or url in this case i'm going to use os remote dot o s i a dot me this is the url that i set is the host name and this is what's pointing to this server and then it wants to know what server do i want to use in this case i'm going to use nginx that's what i'm used to and it's on ubuntu it's going to get the pre-built server package it's going to download that thing and then it should install it for us and everything should be done except for let's encrypt is going to prompt us for some information as it gets to that point so this uses net core in order to run so it's going to go out and grab some of those packages as well with this install script and it's going to install the.net core stuff that it needs on the server and there we go so we're being asked for information for uh getting set up for let's encrypt so i'm going to put in my email address i want it to use and this can ask if you agree to their terms of service just click agree if you do then wants to ask if you're willing to share your email address i've already done this so i'm going to hit end but you can hit yes so what sites would you like to activate https for so i'm just going to press one because there's only one option for me in this case but if you have more than one you can pick more than one finally it's going to ask do you want to redirect any unsecured traffic to http over to https which i do so i'm going to press 2 and then now you can see everything is done and it is complete so we should be able to go to our url now if we go to remote.osia.me there it is so this is my first site so i'm going to set up and i'm going to say register because i'm not registered yet and i'm going to put in my email address there it is now i auto fill the password i want to make sure i get a password i can remember and know and then we're going to click on register and it it'll ask if you want to save it if it's your it's just set up in your browser correctly so here you get kind of the nice overview of what you can actually do inside of remotely it's really actually pretty awesome so you get this home and if you have saved machines here you'll see those listed here if you're going to do a remote control session you can click this and it opens up in a new tab which is nice so you can put in your name as the support person and then the other end the personality they're in will give you their id and then over here you've got a list of tools that you can use um to help get through what's going on on that machine and help you control that machine so we'll go through controlling the machine here in just a minute i'm going to close that down for a second so here's your downloads and this tells you like hey if you want this you know to function in a certain way you have to go you know again to the github actions but these are your installable instant support clients so that something can be installed in their machine so i like to have them download the the portable support client so they have windows 64-bit windows 32-bit and then linux now linux runs on several different distributions so you have to kind of test it out on different ones to see what it'll actually run on these days but i know for sure it'll run on ubuntu and this is a ubuntu executable now the other thing you have is these resident agents so this is something you install on a machine to be able to get control of it anytime you need control of it so if you're an i.t administrator and you have a team of i t people and they're constantly trying to control you know take control of machines and do things on them control your servers things like that you've got some great options here and when you install these things that's what would show up here on this dashboard so that you can take control anytime you need to and kind of check those out now you can create scripts that you can then just utilize while you're logged into other people's machines so that you can run stuff in a hurry and kind of have it saved you can have device details and device id information you of course have user options so you can set up some user options there you can set up organizations and manage your organization you can do a little bit of rebranding so you can brand things and make it look a little bit different or a little bit better you can kind of set it to your own brand instead of using the remotely brands which is really nice this is a cool feature honestly being open source i would expect this to almost be like a paid feature because it's really a nice feature and it just to me i think this this should be something you could you could pay for actually api keys so if you want api keys to write to an api for this you can get them you have server logs so you can see what's going on on the server as well to make sure things aren't happening that are kind of strange so this one here says mime kit so we've got some kind of mime kit error that's happening it's not affecting the server so far so we're looking okay we do have server configuration as well so as far as server admins go and things like that you can do quite a bit here from the server configuration side you have application settings you just have a lot of stuff here in the config so you can just kind of scroll through and make changes and updates so you have smtp setup that you can do so you can get email information sent out as well you have themes so you have dark and you have light and i think if you save then it will change that so just be aware you do have themes you have trusted cores origins so if you need to have cores the cross origin stuff set up you can hsts webrtc i like to check because that makes it do a peer-to-peer connection whenever it can and of course you have connection strings and things like that that you can also use so if you click on your own account you can manage your account here so you've got the username you can put in a phone number for your users you can put in your users email addresses if they don't have it you can set and change their passwords you can set up two-factor authentication and i highly recommend this because you don't want somebody taking over your system so having two-factor authentication as yourself as an admin is really useful as well and forcing your users to have two-factor authentication is great and then of course any personal data that you want to store on here they can download or they can delete it which i think will help with the european side of things where they have uh data restrictions so of course you have account and log out over here but you can always go back to the remotely side just by clicking on the logo there so if you have a lot of machines listed at a limited 25 you can change that and of course you can search the machines right here as well so that's really getting the server up and running if you're running it just on a bare vps the next thing i want to do is actually take you through the install on docker and using a docker image to do the same thing so we'll jump back to it here in just a minute let me get set up for docker all right we're going to install this thing through docker and here we've got the translucency slash remotely image now translucent scac is what jared uses as his github repository name so i'm going to guess that this is his i could be wrong but it looks like a pretty pretty good option there he's got some links to his github repos has read it which is great this is a great place to go ask questions and then his website of course he's got your docker run command and then he's got a docker compose command as well he's got your nginx configuration example if you want to use it and then on down he's got the caddy file example if you need that as well so we're gonna we're gonna go here and and i like docker compose it's pretty great but we've also got just the docker command if we want to use that but we'll just grab docker compose here and we're gonna copy that and i'm gonna go back to the terminal and i've created a folder here called remotely on the server that i use here inside my home network for all of my docker stuff and i'm gonna do nano docker compose dot yml and then i'm gonna paste in that docker compose information so it's got a couple of things here he's got services remotely and it's going to use this image port forwarding so he's got 5000 to 5000 i'm going to change this to 82 82 just pick one that's free um just in case 5000 isn't free pick one that's free and only change the left side you don't want to change the right side this is what the container uses and it needs to be 5000 and then here he's got a volume set for remotely data and he's got remotely data so i'm going to save this with control o and enter and then control x to exit and i'm just going to do mkdir remotely data just to make sure it's there there we go and then i'm gonna do docker compose up hyphen d all right it looks like everything's done we can do docker hyphen logs or sorry we can do docker hyphen compose and then logs and it looks like it should be running so we can go to our browser and i used port 8282 and there we go it's up and running so i've got my register here now this is great this is on my my personal private ip but if i want to access this from outside of my network i actually need to set it up with nginx proxy manager to forward through to this and get some let's encrypt certificates so let's go do that so i'm going to go back over and i'm going to open up my nginx proxy manager and log into it here and i'm going to click on my apps and i'm going to click on add a new host and i just need to go find out what is the ip address of that container that i just started so there's several ways to do that you can do that with docker compose or you can do that with actually just using portainer so is a really great way to see this kind of stuff i'm just going to refresh my container list here real quick there's our remotely one container so i'm just going to click on it i'm going to go down and it's it's got the 25 sub domain here so i'm just going to use that ip address and i'm going to call this remote remotely dot route me home.org and i'm going to leave it at http i'm going to set that to 172.25.0.1 and that's 8282 is the port i'm going to say websocket support and i'm going to say cash assets and it's publicly accessible for now now i can block that later but for now i'm just going to say that i'm going to test it just to make sure i can get to it on the http option so we're going to save that and here's my entry right here so i'm just going to click it [Music] and it opens up great so i've got step one done awesome now i'm going to go back here and i'm going to edit that entry so i'm just going to click on the three dots i'm going to click on edit and then i'm going to jump over to ssl here i'm going to say request a new certificate i'm going to force ssl and then i'm going to have my email address in here if you don't have your email address when you're using nginx proxy manager go ahead and put your email address and then click that you agree to their terms and then click save all right so now that we've got https set we're just going to click here and you can see we now get logged into our remotely here locally and it's on https and it's got a valid certificate from let's encrypt so we can register and again i'll just put in the email address that i want to use and it gives me a password let's make sure it's a good strong password here and then we'll register and here we are and we're inside of our remotely application that is running here locally on my network at home instead of out on the internet so you can do this with nginx proxy manager and you can run it in docker as you saw and this is the official image there from lucenc which is great i'm really impressed with the remotely application let's try this from a linux box i'm having a little bit of a hard time with my windows virtual machine it's not wanting to do anything correctly on the internet so let's just figure out why uh looks great let's go to remotely.rowmehome.org and let's go to downloads let's get to linux 64-bit and we'll save that file you can see it happened pretty quick there let's see we're going to go and close this we're going to go to our downloads folder now for ubuntu we have to install a couple of things before we can actually use the quick support client so we need to do sudo apt update we're gonna let that update run real quick and grab some repos and we're going to install a few uh dependencies here and again these are on the github repo i'll have that linked but if you look down into there under the client requirements for the quickens for the quick client you'll see this so it makes it a little bit easier if you know that that's there we're gonna do sudo apt install live x11 dev we're just gonna put a space and then live x r a n d r dev and then a space live c6 dev and then a space live gdi plus live x t s t dev and x clip so we're going to say yes to install all of those things we're going to let it go out and grab them real quick get them installed so once we've got all those extras installed we just we can go into our downloads folder and do dot slash remotely and just tab to get remotely desktop now you want to use sudo in order to run this because it's going to need sudo privileges so we'll do sudo and there you go and you see it pulls up and it says initializing so you can see a bunch of stuff happening here in the background as it initializes and it says hey what's the uh server url so i'm going to put in https let's see uh https colon slash remotely i'm going to hit ok it's going to reach out to my server it's going to say you know what i need a key so now i've got this key okay so i'm going to go back over to my server and in the server i'm going to go to my remote control tab here i'm going to type in my name as the person who will be helping and then i'm going to type in this key seven four five six four one two eight two i believe i'm going to hit connect now you see that's going to prompt me over on this side it says hey you've got a connection request and i have to say yes if i say no it's not going to let this person connect and it's going to disconnect us so i'm going to say no first and you'll see i don't ever get connected so i'm having to switch back and forth between the screens here for you to see this but i don't get connected so i'm just going to close this tab i'm going to go back i'm going to say remote control again and i'm going to do it again so it keeps my name which is great but i need to put in the key again now i also want you to notice if i close this um in fact let me close this first on the windows side all right so we're gonna do dot slash remotely again oh sudo remotely we'll let this thing boot up it's going to go and it's going to say initializing again but this time it's going to grab a new address so you see now it's got a new number so i can't use the same number over and over when they kill it it's done and until they restart and give you a new number there is no reattaching i love that i think that's an amazing feature for somebody who's wanting some security on their system knowing that nobody else could get on it again until they reopen the app and give them a new number so we're going to type in this number 509 688-1999 we're going to hit connect and again it's going to prompt us the time i'm going to say yes and you see now i've got access over here on my remotely server and i can move this guy around okay so it's a little bit jumpy but i can move things around it's not going to stream super fast and it's kind of weird because i'm remoted into a remote and i'm looking at a remote so that could be creating issues as well but i can go and just stop recording here on the on the windows side now actually i'm going to leave it up just give me a second so on the window side if i uncheck the little box for me over here i shouldn't be able to control anything anymore and i can't you see i can't click anything now so i can see what this user is doing i can see that i'm moving it on the windows side but i can't actually i can't do anything from the linux side because they've unchecked my name so the user has power to take away your ability to mess with their machine which i think is a great a great tool as well a great feature now if i check it again i can come back and now i can click and i can do things from the linux side so that's pretty awesome now from the linux side i do have the controls here so there's view only so i could turn that on and when i do see i can't click so it takes away my mouse so if i'm telling the user hey i need you to do something i want you to do it i'm just going to watch i can turn this on for myself so that i i can move my mouse around on my screen and do stuff and i'm not messing with what they're trying to do here i'm not taking away their mouse control which is great i can use the clipboard to copy things around i can block remote input now i'm not sure this works on linux but on windows i'm pretty sure it works but if i click on block remote input see this person still has total control i can't block it from my side but on windows i think you can actually block it i can invite others so if i have other users on my remotely server and i want to invite somebody else to join this session i can do that and add extra users to the remotely session so they can see what's happening sometimes you need an extra person to come in if you're a support person you might need somebody from your deployment team somebody from your dev team things like that to take a look at something so this is a really cool feature you can turn on audio in case you need to hear something from the other side of course you've got file transfer so you can click there to do a file transfer you can say upload or download depending on what you want to do you can just you should be able to click away from that i think maybe just click off of it again yeah you just click it again to get it to go away you can do ctrl alt delete so you can send control out delete to that machine now i don't think that does anything on linux but on windows that's a useful tool um you can of course disconnect from your session now you can set up the auto quality you can turn it off if you don't want auto quality you can look and see if they have multiple monitors so you can say i want to switch monitors right here which is great i'm going to turn auto quality back on you can set it for full screen so in this case i don't have it full screen but i can set it to go full screen now it's not very big anyways it's already like a small screen over here so it doesn't really help me but if they had a screen that would have been like filling up the screen it would work escape yeah there we go escape out of it there okay so you've got fit so if you turn that off it'll try to you know tries to fit it properly then you can record so you can make a recording of the screen so i can record kind of what i'm doing and how i'm doing it and i can go here and i can say you know i need a new terminal so i can right click i should be able to do control shift in and get a new terminal so it opened up a new terminal on their screen and i can do ls and i can do clear and i can do cd to go back so i can do all kinds of things i don't think oh i do have tree installed look at that so it's going to do tree show you all the stuff that i have in my tree there i can do cd downloads and then do tree dot slash let's see tree yeah there we go so you can see the tree of stuff that i have here in the downloads as well something pretty useful i like that a lot and then we can of course uh stop the recording and then i can download the recorded session right here and i can save that file to my desktop or to my downloads folder actually in this case and then i can go back and watch that downloaded session if i need to now here you can see on the connection it says that it tries to connect through uh webrtc but if it's orange it tells you that it's being relayed through your server now if it can make a peer-to-peer connection i think it goes green which tells you you've got a direct peer-to-peer connection which should be a much better connection actually for doing all this stuff but this is pretty great i mean just think about this this is something that you probably haven't tried to do i'm using barrier on a machine that's remoted in from another machine so this is going to be kind of weird with the mouse please ignore any weirdness with the mouse if i grab my own mouse here maybe it'll be better yeah there we go so if i use the mouse that's actually naturally on this machine i can do exactly what i would expect to be able to do i can go here and i can check out pictures music any of that kind of stuff and i can see what all i've got so i mean really cool i like remotely a lot we're running it here in docker and we're using it in docker using his official docker application of course if i close that terminal that's going to close remotely down because that's how it's running but there we go so we've got everything running there and it's really great and now when i'm ready i can just come over say i'm going to disconnect thank you very much for your help for for letting me help you appreciate your time there we go and we've got everything up and done and it's it's ready to go so i think that's really a great tool remotely has been so super simple to use so jared does take donations and he does take github support if you have any options or if you have any opportunity if you're using this tool and you're using it for business i definitely think about donating to them i donate a few dollars a month because i think it's a totally amazing tool i wish i could afford to do more i wish that i could afford to like just completely support the guy for doing this because it is really a great tool i'd love to make sure that it stays open source i appreciate that he open sourced it i think it's really terrific so if you guys haven't had a chance to get out there and check it out go check out remotely it's really great i know he's got plans to do a mac os client as well i don't think it's out there yet but i'm excited to see that as well so if he can get mac os support and then on top of that have linux and windows i mean you want to talk about a terrific open source tool this is the one so definitely get out there check it out give it a try if you have questions post come over to the discussion over on opensourcesawesome.com discuss.opensourcesawesome.com it's a rocket chat server where you can ask questions i'll try to help you other people may try to help you if they can definitely get out there and then check out his reddit if you have questions specifically about remotely hope you enjoyed this if you did like subscribe tell your friends about it so then come along the journey with us and i'll talk to you next time you

Channel: Awesome Open Source

Views: 31,519

Keywords: open, source, opensource, open-source, self, hosted, selfhosted, self-hosted, free, software, server, web, browser, linux, windows, microsoft, raspberry, desktop, digital, ocean, digitalocean, vps, tutorial, how to, setup, installation, instructions, open source software, open source news, open source projects, remote, support, gotoassist, go to assist, team viewer, teamviewer, any desk, anydesk, bomgar, remote support software, remote support platform, Screenly, dameware, freshdesk, logimein, splashtop, chrome remote

Id: fZY8fsq6AJ8

Length: 34min 25sec (2065 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021