It's perhaps worth noting that the with the venerable GNU Screen, you can more or less achieve this by enabling multiuser mode and then doing screen -x.
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Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
#12If you're working on the same machine (say via SSH) you can also share a session with tmux.
https://www.hamvocke.com/blog/remote-pair-programming-with-t...
Re: Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
#13There isn't a link to terms of the subscription, at least I couldn't find one on mobile. Is the single user license for a single host or a single assister? Do both users need a license? Is it per device or per person?
Re: Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
#14Is it possible to prevent the assister from actually executing the commands on your system? I could use this in a lot more places if the assister could see my screen/output and propose commands for me to run, but I was still in control of what commands are executed. (i.e. if I could safely use this as part of the customer support process for my customers, I would be extremely willing to pay for it).
Yeah I was thinking about that... Can the remote person do this:
assist scp $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub me@myserver.com/user/downloads
Re: Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
#15Do you allow outright all and any commands in the terminal, sudo and all? Does the data go through your pipes at all or strictly between assist clients?
Great questions - these are covered in our FAQ (admittedly buried at the bottom of the home page): https://assist.app/faq.html Can the assist servers access my computer? > No, the assist servers are only used for tunneling the connection over the internet. All data exchanged between the assister and assistee is encrypted over SSH. The assist command that is given to the assistee contains all keys necessary to setup a…
This looks great! I just wish I didn’t have a use for it
Re: Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
#16Honest question: What's the difference with tmate? I haven't seen a reference to it in the site and it looks pretty similar in purpose and usage from a quick look.
tmate is pretty similar but there are a few things about it architecturally that are different I think. The person connecting to you connects through a tmux server on the tunneling host rather than directly to your tmux session. This means that the tunneling server can see and modify everything sent over tmate. If the tunneling server is untrusted or compromised, an attacker would be able to run commands on your machine. Unfortunately, to make things worse, the ssh key fingerprint of the tunneling server is not bundled with tmate, so during the first connection to any tunnel an attacker performing a man-in-the-middle can spoof the server and use the fact that the server is trusted to run arbitrary commands on your machine. The attacker can either man-in-the-middle the person running tmate or the person connecting to the tmate user to perform this attack.
This more complex architecture is likely why tmate is using libssh even though libssh recently had a very serious authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2018-10933). These architectural choices may provide benefit in certain circumstances, but we thought were unnecessary just to share a shell.
Assist has a simpler architecture and is built on top of unmodified Screen and OpenSSH (we use the installed binaries on your machine). The tunneling servers are designed to be completely untrusted, and the command you paste to the assistant contains all the information necessary to prevent a man-in-the-middle attack from seeing or modifying the session. We hope to add more features in the future and felt that starting with a simpler architecture would help with that.
Re: Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
#17Is it possible to prevent the assister from actually executing the commands on your system? I could use this in a lot more places if the assister could see my screen/output and propose commands for me to run, but I was still in control of what commands are executed. (i.e. if I could safely use this as part of the customer support process for my customers, I would be extremely willing to pay for it).
Yeah I was thinking about that... Can the remote person do this: assist scp $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub me@myserver.com/user/downloads
Yeah the remote person can do whatever they want. They can definitely also hide what they're trying to do without much effort. The idea is to use this only with people who you would give physical access to anyways. I do really like the idea of a read-only mode with a way to suggest commands as a way to open this up to more use cases.
Re: Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
#18$5/month/user seems high when you're not providing any hosting. Also you need at least $10/month to actually do anything which again seems high.
This type of software should really be something like $30-$60/license and $10-$20 upgrade fee for latest version.
Re: Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
#19$5/month/user seems high when you're not providing any hosting. Also you need at least $10/month to actually do anything which again seems high. This type of software should really be something like $30-$60/license and $10-$20 upgrade fee for latest version.
it seems like they do provide some sort of proxy server for this however, which explains the MRC.
Re: Show HN: Assist – Instant terminal sharing from anywhere
#20Why would I pay money for a thing that already exists and is free?