selkies. it's what you want.

In reply to mattl.

It's never really been updated frequently, but they do manage to push out an update once a year or so these days.  No new features, just the usual "bug fixes and performance improvements" but they're there.  

In reply to jwz.

Looks like there’s a DMG for the client but not the server, but they haven’t bothered to pay the $99 to sign it which seems suspicious when they’re selling this for $10 a month as a service too.

I’m with you that anything that’s “Install Docker” (or “just curl this script to bash”) isn’t worth it.

Going to take a look at Screens which seems to have Tailscale integration.

In reply to mike b.

Is it still maintained? It always looks like something they sell but don’t do anything with it, like macOS Server was for the last few years before they killed it off.

In reply to jwz.

Rust deck is basically “team viewer without license fees”. I think it is ultimately h265 over udp. The “app” is both the app server and the display server; the “server” is a tiny headless CLI daemon that does NAT hole punching.

The Apple "Remote Desktop" app is my daily driver for this, via ssh.  It does much better at mac-to-mac than a generic vnc client, it has mac-specific extensions that help optimize things, or it did last time I looked into it several years ago.   It's like $80 on the app store, I think.  

In reply to jwz.

There are UDP games, but they aren't needed for your use case (they're for LAN client discovery).  On the other hand, the reason I'm not using it is because it relies on the rust ecosystem.

In reply to Zygo.

Yes, well, things that play UDP games are going to be very difficult to tunnel through ssh, so go ahead and interpret "works through ssh" as something more practical than "well technically it's a Turning machine, soooooo"

I have no idea whether this rust thing does that, but that's beside the point. (And since it seems to be docker shovelware rather than an app, I'm not gonna bother finding out.)

In reply to Zygo.

Put another way:  you can forward a lot of sh*t over SSH tunnels.  Unless rustdesk does something to prevent operation over a SSH tunnel, you don't need to question the requirement for SSH at all.

In reply to naikrovek.

Why would rustdesk not work over an SSH tunnel?  Looks like the client can be told to connect to a specific IP, the server can be bound to localhost, and if you're really paranoid, you can firewall both the client and server sides so they can't advertise to the world.  Essentially the same setup as forwarding VNC over SSH, but with different port numbers.

In reply to naikrovek.

JFC. Doubling down on answering a question I did not ask, when the question I did ask had specificity, has earned you a block. *plonk*

In reply to Zygo.

The other thing adults these days do is render their UI with something like HTML and Javascript.  NeWS for the modern era.

In reply to Probably not Robert W. Scheifler.

Adults these days have the client render with its GPU to a window buffer, then hurl that buffer at a display using H.264 or similar encoding, and have some side protocol to send back HID events.  It's the modern way to get video (with audio) from your phone onto your car's dashboard or living room's TV, or to play video games from a remote server in a data center, or to run a KVM-IP device.

The fundamental assumption built into this model is that the computing and rendering power rests in the originating device.  Most phone CPU/GPU stacks in the field are massively more powerful than the car dashboards or TV sets they will encounter, so this assumption holds most of the time.

To do something like X (drawing primitives over the wire, with render and compute on opposite sides of a network) only makes sense when there's a gap between render and compute capabilities that is so wide it can absorb the remote latency penalty (think "high-end gamer desktop rendering the X11R6 UI from a Raspberry Pi 1B").  Even if you have an insanely fast local GPU that can render complex frames, you need a fast CPU and fast network to feed that GPU enough data to keep it busy, or there's no point, and you'll be better off doing the H.264 thing instead.

Once you throw in modern UI requirements (e.g. fonts), the bandwidth requirements grow far past what you get from just running H.264 over the final rendered product.  As a bonus, many of the hacks that remote graphics protocols of the 1990's needed, like local clipping, backing store, scrolling, off-screen image caching, and lazy updating, can be encoded in a H.264 stream without having to bother a client with managing any of the details.

To me, the weird thing is that this model hasn't completely displaced everything in VNC's niche by now.  What's up with that?  Patents?

In reply to jwz.

well, some people say things are requirements when they aren't, sometimes. some people haven't considered other solutions, sometimes. some people don't know other options are available, sometimes. not everyone knows everything. someone asking a question about something is asking a question *because* they don't know everything, and the percentage of people who ask questions that are not the exact question they want answered is very high.

i was simply trying to help. if my help is not good enough for you, ignore me.

In reply to 🅼🅰🆁🅺.

Yes, I am aware of how to operate Screen Sharing. It is still trash.

In reply to macfixer.

Literally never TeamViewer. Terrible platform security, awful product, and a genuinely horrible company. I'd rather use an Oracle product than give those lying thieves a penny. They should be banned form writing software. They've violated so many user agreements over the years I'm astounded when I find someone still using them. GoDaddy is more trustworthy.

In reply to Cory Carson.

I'll be honest, I'm surprised to hear people are using MoMachine. I have tried it a couple of times, never got it working. I assumed it was one of those ghost products that looks alive, but it's really just abandoned in place.

In reply to pallas.

Well now, don't be so sure:  we could probably hire a lot of people in a cheap country and then get them to make drawings which we'll send via scp.

I mean, that's pretty much how Waymo's 'autonomous' 'driving' works, right?  I suppose for the full effect we'd need somehow to include some crypto mining.

Been doing it this way for years:

1) Via macOS Terminal:
ssh -L 5901:localhost:5900 username@ipaddress

2) Via macOS Screen Sharing:
vnc://localhost:5901

3) Login to the remote macOS system

In reply to pallas.

I've got a vibe-coded PDF renderer that takes Display Postscipt over a Wireguard tunnel and gives you a slideshow, sometimes above 30fps. /s

K3n.

Hi Jamie. I acknowledge your comment that the macOS program 'Screen Sharing' is trash. That said, I routinely use 'Screen Sharing' as follows via SSH:

1) Via macOS terminal:
ssh -L 5901:localhost:5900 username@ipaddress

2) Via macOS 'Screen Sharing', connect to:
vnc://localhost:5901

3) Login to the remote macOS system.

I created a ZSH script named 'go' so I can (for example) type in 'go macstss' and it runs the requisite ssh command (like the one I shared).

I'm cautiously optimistic this may be helpful. The one thing that I like about 'Screen Sharing', despite its limitations and shortcomings, is that it's produced directly by Apple. While anything is possible, I'm more inclined to believe that Apple is less likely to have any built-in mechanisms within 'Screen Sharing' that could compromise the relative sanctity of the SSH connection.

In reply to naikrovek.

if it doesn't need to be done on a computer, sending drawings through the mail may work well for you. /s

In reply to jwz.

Screen Sharing appears to be ARD with most of the bells and whistles sawed off.  ARD uses 5900, 3283 and 22 (it uses ssh tunneling natively).  22 is hardcoded in the client and in system preferences.  I tried forwarding alternate ports (15900, 13283) and it seems to be checking 3283 via Bonjour, because it reverts to 3283 repeatedly.  Shutting remote management and remote login on the host off and forwarding the usual ports makes it claim the remote host doesn't have Remote Management enabled.  I suspect this is more Bonjour meddling.

I tried nomachine in a Linux environment years ago, and found it to be brittle and cantankerous (and x2go was not much better).

I'm tempted to suggest a mesh/P2P VPN of some sort, or one of the other remote desktop solutions (TeamViewer, sure, why not.  Possibly also Parsec or Splashtop).

TL;DR:  ARD over ssh might be doomed, or unreasonably entertaining at best.

In reply to thielges.

Oh and why are there seemingly no data centers with small quadcopter drones that have finglongers attached? What kind of stupid future is this that has Nazis but no finglonger drones to push reset buttons?

NuoRDS is a commercial option from what I think is a Ukranian company. It uses Microsoft's RDP, so client support is pretty broad (Remmina on Linux). Performance is OK, reliability is good. Sure beats VNC. Worth the money if you absolutely need it.

The built-in macOS VNC server is surprisingly bad, but it's my fallback when NuoRDS isn't installed yet.

In reply to Dagon.

Everything seems like trash until you consider the alternative of traveling an hour to endure a little hot/cold 90dB colo spa experience just to unhang a server.  Then every remote control application is made of gold.

In reply to Dagon.

I've long been surprised at the lack of any focus on remote compute windowing systems like X where the UI can just be run remotely from the underlying processes.

It seems like it would be a great fit for using lightweight devices like phones and tablets to run processes on a headless home computer with some heft to it. Also for adapting UIs to the device where they're encountered. (VNC on a 3.5" phone trying to use a desktop plugged into a 40" 4K screen is shit)

Instead we're stuck with schlepping bitmaps of the entire screen around or SaaS.

In reply to naikrovek.

What part of "through an ssh tunnel" led you to believe that your "if you don't need ssh" suggestion would be in any way helpful? What has gone wrong in your life or your head?

FWIW I have used Sunshine and Moonlight to control my Mac on my LAN. Never tried WAN, though.

In reply to macfixer.

Just be sure to secure teamviewer.  It is a favorite target of the roaming door handle jigglers.