I’ve been using RealVNC for family computer help and have been wanting to setup a self hosted replaced for a while now, but haven’t had the time. RealVNC has recently axed their free levels, so I’ll use it as a reason to setup a self hosted solution.
Ideally it would be something like a web page (I have a domain and reverse proxy) where family can go, get a code or a software to run, which will then let me control their system securely.
I was considering guacamole on a pi at each location I’m likely to have to support, but this doesn’t help when family is away from their home network on laptop.
What is out there for this? Have you used it? What are your experiences?
Thanks
I use Rustdesk for 99% of my remote desktop needs (RealVNC only for my Raspberry Pi).
I will add that self-hosting Rustdesk makes it reliable and fast. When I use the public servers, it was not a good experience.
I’m running it off my Synology NAS through docker.
Haven’t used it myself but you could give https://rustdesk.com/ a try.
I have always preferred TightVNC over the various other VNC flavours. It does only one thing, but does it well, with minimal setup and network requirements.
I have tried RustDesk recently, and the performance when it worked was nice. But I found it too complex to set up across more than a few machines, and ultimately unreliable, with connections failing without any useful error message, an unresponsive relay, weird certificate errors, etc… It needs a couple of years to mature.
I would suggest looking into using WireGuard to wire your various networks and computers together. It works very well most platforms. You can easily give laptops a road-warrior connection, so they always phone home. Then it doesn’t matter where they are.
Your requirements sound a lot like Chrome Remote Desktop and it’s pretty trivial to install, which might be a handy thing for family members that aren’t tech-savvy.
