Yeah, I've used it at times. It's great when it works, but getting remote desktop working is always a bigger pain than just trying to explain the problem over the phone. The individual issues aren't that big, but it means a 20 minute phone call turns in to a 1 hour phone call because we spend 20 minutes trying to get screen sharing working.
For one thing, I'm generally away from my computer when they call me, and all I have is my phone. If that isn't an issue, then port forwarding is an issue, or the desktop sharing they have on their computer is out of date, or they only have RDC, and I can't find a Windows computer. Sharing the desktop via chrome works pretty well, it still can be an exercise in frustration. For instance, my dad is a trader, and has 8 monitors. Getting him to share the correct screens takes forever. (I don't know how Windows decides where to open a window, but it seems like it tries to find a monitor my dad isn't looking at and opening it behind a window marked stay-on-top.)
I might use it if the problem was extremely urgent and extremely complicated, but I live about 30 minutes from them, so I'd just head over to their house if it was that bad. Screen sharing software was just one more thing to go wrong on their computers. This way, I don't have to worry about whether they have a version with a critical vulnerability, or if they'll fall for a social engineering attack and click on a teamviewer invite.
This software solves my concern about not being able to see what the hell my parents are doing when I'm telling them shell commands. This makes it really easy. They'd already be using Linux if I knew I'd always be able to use desktop sharing to look at their computer, and port forwarding/security/etc wasn't a concern, because connecting to a remote X server is incredibly easy. I already fix internet issues by SSHing in to the router (with key-based authentication) and then connecting to whatever piece of hardware needs to be tinkered with. I could probably do the same thing for an actual desktop, but I've fixed misbehaving servers via ssh on my phone before, and typing commands on a phone keyboard is an exercise in frustration.
In any case, I sat down with my dad and created a clean image of his desktop a while back. When he really messes something up he just reimages his computer. He likes the fact that I gave him the ability to bring his computer back from the dead himself. All his files are installed on a separate disk, which is constantly backed up, so he never loses more than about 20 minutes of work.
>Screen sharing software was just one more thing to go wrong on their computers. This way, I don't have to worry about whether they have a version with a critical vulnerability, or if they'll fall for a social engineering attack and click on a teamviewer invite.
It's no more of a risk really with TeamViewer installed. An attacker can use gotomypc or similar or just send a TeamViewer invite binary (or link to download it and give the attacker access).
Wasn't there some story a few months back about TeamViewer accounts being hacked in some unknown way and their access used to infect machines? Was that ever clearly resolved? (I remember speculation of TeamViewer themselves being compromised, or just a massive password-reuse attack, or ...)
It's never been clearly resolved, but also hasn't developed. So far it looks like TV was correct and the breaches were the result of password reuse from other sites who did have passwords compromised.
I suggested this in a recent similar thread: if this is a desktop, you could switch to an entry-level server motherboard with IPMI.
Then run the IPMI cable to OpenVPN on (eg) an RPi or even directly on the router.
You can configure and soak-test the router/RPi/etc locally, and IPMI is OOB.
Using an RPi/similar has some nice properties: you could VNC to that and then go from there to the IPMI console, and also recovery images stored directly on the RPi would upload quickly etc.
In an ideal world, the Issues team would develop and support a plugin ecosystem for the tracker. Users can customize and add the features they see fit and even create their own custom plugins. Allows flexibility and power for those who want it while keeping the core simple and clean
While some features like +1s and contributing guidelines should be baked in, other features like extra fields, requiring people to sign a disclosure, etc would be best left to plugins that can hook into issues much like CI services hook into pull requests.
I work at a digital agency (http://carrot.is/, hosted on Netlify), and Netlify has become our go to hosting solution for all our static projects. Their API is killer, but what we've fallen in love with most of all is the webhook support. That means we can use an external CMS like Wordpress or Contentful, load that data into the static site generator of choice (in our case roots: http://roots.cx/), and then send a webhook to Netlify to recompile the site every time content changes.
They've also been super responsive to any issues we've had, even proactively contacting us when a build fails with a solution in hand before we even noticed. Everything gets pushed to a CDN so our sites are as fast as they can possibly be. Happy to answer any questions from a customer POV, highly recommend these guys.
Very interested in this - and thanks for the detailed write-up on your blog on how to execute the Netlify/Contentful setup. One question: a lot of pages I work on are of the format "one big page" where you've got all the content on one page, with some navigation element to get you up and down the page. Basically the pages are divided into "bands" or "sections".
When I've tried to build these with static site generators (our current favorite is hexo but I'm going to look at roots), I've found that there isn't a good way to separate out content. We end up with the content being stored in .JADE files which are definitely not content editor friendly. I haven't found anyway to deal with this in a markdown file either. So we end up with a nice solution for the developers, but a poor solution for the content editor.
Do you have any approach to this using Contentful? Do you setup sections as individual entries, or is all the content for a page a single entry?
Lastly, how do clients feel about using Contentful? Is there any concern that they might go out of business? This is the common concern I hear with using anything other than Wordpress and would love to hear how you address it.
I highly recommend you check out roots (http://roots.cx/), a static site generator that lets you use a CMS like Wordpress to manage content and then pulls data from its API to build a static site.
We've set up a full featured publishing workflow by coupling this with outgoing webhooks on Wordpress using hookpress and a great static hosting platform called Netlify that accepts incoming webhooks to trigger new static builds with roots when content is updated on Wordpress.
So far it's been fantastic for us. We enjoy all the benefits of a static site: low hosting costs, simple infrastructure, highly scalable, and virtually zero downtime, while still giving our users a familiar CMS interface.
We're are using a similar workflow to power our site (http://carrot.is/) but instead of Wordpress we're using Contentful, an API-based CMS with webhook support. Luckily, roots has a very flexible extensions API, so whatever CMS you want to use, as long as it has an API it can be turned into a static site.
I'm curious, by really simple are you referring to using a traditional out of the box CMS like Wordpress?
This works great for us as a digital agency because we usually have multiple projects going on at once that need to perform at scale immediately (traffic from large brand media buys and sharing on social platforms), so we needed tools to be able to manage static content.
If you have different ideas on how to allow non-developers to manage a static site (without having to edit our code repo), I'd love to chat :-).
I use WordPress with lots of caching and CloudFlare, but for some reason the caching wasn't working and I couldn't get it up. Had to move it to Medium and will fix the blog soon.
