[BALUG-Talk] Lubuntu 14.04 guest session login failure ... and ... remote support via ...

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 9:45 AM, Michael Paoli
<Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> The bit I did find on Debian related to Debian
> detecting difference in Lubuntu specific patch not in
> Debian.

Thanks, this will be helpful for the bug report :)

> Curious also, when the file was present, did you use fuser(1) or similar
> to see if anything still had the file open?  Was the file also possibly
> non-empty in size, and possibly contained a PID or the like?  And if so,
> did that PID still exist and what was it?
> Did fuser(1) or lsof(8) show any process having open for write/append,
> or having any lock on /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group, /etc/gshadow,
> or any of the lock files thereof?

In spite of the timestamp of the lock file being April, I still I
confirmed with lsof that it was not being used by anything else. No
other lock files were hanging around either.

> More [meta] help ... been thinking of this for the "mom" computer,
> or similar for [great]grand{ma,dad}, etc.  Notably where remote
> access - e.g. to troubleshoot/support, could be quite useful, but
> computer may typically be behind NAT/SNAT on The Internet and/or have
> dynamic IP(s), etc. - so not so feasible to run an ssh server there and
> just use ssh to access the computer.

Right, these systems are just on a shared network with an
unsophisticated router controlling access, no easy point of access.

> ... well, "reverse ssh" ... I remember
> someone asking the question a *long* time ago, and ... someone else's
> excellent response.  I don't recall much of the detail of the response
> anymore, but key bit I do recall of it, was using ssh port forwarding,
> so, effectively, the computer would do a "call home" to some Internet
> accessible server ... which would then cause port to be opened on that
> Internet accessible server - one could then ssh to the desired target
> computer via that port.  E.g., have done bit of proof of concept testing
> on that, and essentially works fine.

Thanks, I'm familiar with this method and have used it before. I have
considered it to avoid on-site visits in the case of an emergency,
perhaps more feasible once we get our system in place to roll out
custom Lubuntu ISOs on all the sites.

I will mention that in our current setup the emergency visits also
serve as a good opportunity to check in on things otherwise, we had to
swap out a mouse yesterday that we didn't know had been acting up.
This doesn't reflect poorly upon them in any way, it's simply been my
experience that unsophisticated users tend not to report problems,
they work around them if they're not bad because they don't want to
bother us, even when we tell them it's not a bother and that's what
we're around for! Same thing happened at the schools we worked with,
same thing happens with visiting relatives during holidays, "good
grief, how long has it been doing this for?" ;)

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2