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I had similar requirements and fell upon mesh central. To keep it secure on web I have it hidden behind cloudflare tunnel and an access policy.
Bonus points it even supports mobile devices if you need to help your mum with those too.
Another one I was a fan of was level RMM if you can stay below the 10 device limit it’s completely free - all hosted on their cloud. I have too many children so had to switch from level.
I had the same setup and the same problems with VPN (in my case Wireguard) server availability. While looking for a solution I realized I was trying to solve an architecture problem with software.
Instead of trying to find a software solution to work around my WG server uptime issues, I moved the Wireguard endpoint to an OpenWRT router. Now if my router is up, my WG endpoint is up and my network is accessible. I've been running this configuration for years and it has been 100% accessible.
I'm comfortable with the security of WG - open ports for WG endpoints are invisible to network scanners because they do not respond at all and appear closed unless they are sent the the correct key. Even if an attacker has some way of know a WG peer is listening on a specific port, cracking a 256-bit key would take trillions of years. I was then free to choose a remote access application without worrying about remote attackers gaining access to my servers because of some company's failed security.
FOSS VNC server apps work OK, but I found them somewhat limited so I added NoMachine as my primary option and run both. It's a commercial app but it's free, and is one of the only closed source app I use. It can be run 100% locally (although they have a paid option that uses their servers). It allows full control over your servers including file transfer and audio.
Doesn't check all your boxes, but it comes close.
Guacamole in an LXC container and a virtual desktop in another.
Requires no client side software, supports totp, lets me do remote admin on weird stuff like printers and home routers.
Thank you! I was just looking through the recommended software list linked in the community sidebar yesterday and this wasn’t on there. I was going to try setting up MeshCentral this weekend, how does this compare to that?
I don’t know much about guacamole, but if you have intel CPU, MeshCentral can tap into vPro and you can turn on your computer remotely, with very minimal setup.
The downside to MC is it’s not super stable. Sometimes I can’t connect to an agent, and need to reinstall before I can connect. Not a huge issue, but slightly annoying.
I have absolutely no idea. I just run this over wireguard and call it a day.
Fair, I’d call “just running it” a point in its favor, and now I have something to do further research on!
why don't you want to open an ssh port? what's wrong with that?
just disable password authentication, and maybe get fail2ban. am i missing something?
Optional extra, which I do: Change the SSH port to something non-standard. It's not more secure, but it does cut down on the logspam.
I'd argue it's even more secure, as it reduces the amount of attacks you are exposed to. For targeted attacks it changes absolutely nothing. But it keeps you our of a few DBs and spares some brute force attacks.
Essentially, log spam… But also an irrational fear of a security breach.
IMO ssh is the tool you're describing. My ssh server is exposed to the WAN and is configured like this:
PasswordAuthentication noPermitRootLogin nowhy no root login? how do you become root if you need it?
root is a user account that has all privileges and is what bots are programmed to probe, so exposing it introduces unnecessary risk. IMO there's no reason to permit root login via ssh in any circumstance, ever, in all cases, absolutely.
For all the people thinking, "well the world doesn't work in absolutes, there's always a special case!" There isn't.
If a user needs to use elevated permissions, there are many ways to do that without exposing root. sudo(8) is one way to do that.
Thanks for the great explanation! Seems like because logging in as root is never necessary and indeed never done; people confuse sudoer for root login.
do you use sudo with a password? this and the unknown username is what get as additional security then?
sudo -i is what I would do or su root if your other user is not a superuser.
Without root user login, the attacker would have to guess not only the password to the user but also the username (hopefully it's not something simple like admin), and once you are logged in you can use sudo -i to chage into root, which will require a password, therefore, we also disable password login so if someone does manage to somehow compromise the SSH user, they'd still need the password to become root.
guess not only the password
what password? shouldn't we all use ssh-keys by now?
Did you read it to the end?
we also disable password login
ah! there it is. sorry.
You could spin a publicly exposed WireGuard daemon firewalled to allow peers access to the non-public SSH port only, which would result in double encryption, but would give you the peace of mind that an attacker would have to compromise both at the same time, which is very unlikely. Plus, WireGuard is very cheap to deploy and produces no logs. We use that model in my office to access our server.
Edit: Otherwise, as others mentioned, you'd move the SSH daemon to a random port, disable password login and weaker keys and cyphers, setup Fail2ban, and optionally setup GeoIP blocking (only allow IPs from your region to connect).
For remote access I use two solutions that both have the features your looking for.
The first one which I have used for longer than I can remember is MeshCentral https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral
This one works great, is web based, let's you access a shell, or you can make port tunnels been agents, access RDP or vnc in the web UI, the file system etc.
it's a really great one stop shop that more than covers what you're looking for.
The second is RustDesk https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk with the betterdesk server and web UI https://github.com/UNITRONIX/BetterDesk
This one scratched my TeamViewer itch and weekend pretty well. It's newer than MeshCentral and not as easy to setup however on top of the web client it's got apps which in my opinion provide a better experience for remote desktop access than MeshCentrals novnc client especially around copy paste.
All in all, of your looking for something ultra easy I recommend MeshCentral, it's minor quirks around novnc are so easy to overlook since it just works so well.
If you want a modern TeamViewer then go with RustDesk/betterdesk but it's newer and needs some extra work to get going.
All these projects are open source, free, self hostable, has headless file and terminal access, and have web clients.
For using Linux on any remote solution you pretty much have to run the desktop on x11 instead of Wayland. I don't know if any software has found a great Wayland solution yet.
Rustdesk seconded here, I found it fairly straightforward to setup on Mint. I previously had used TeamViewer and AnyDesk
Two tools I have been using to replace TeamViewer that check some of your boxes, but not all are:
Both free and widely used in the community for many of the purposes you’re looking for.
Both operate slightly different from each other. But to give you insight into how I use them:
I use Tailscale as a VPN into my house for stuff like Jellyfin remote viewing on my iPhone or laptop when not at home, SSH/RDP/SMB remote access into my home network and between my devices. I replaced my Docker VPN that was becoming tedious to manage with this and it’s been a lot better and easier to manage.
I use RustDesk for my family and friends who want my help like out of state relatives. It works just like TeamViewer but without the greed or stupid nags or limitations to force you to pay. It just works.
There’s some others like RustDesk others may recommend too. There’s a few others out there I’ve tried, but RustDesk has been great for me.
Haven’t used TeamViewer in over 5 years because of these and other similar services.
A buddy just shipped a pre-configured Comet Q to their parents.
Waw. That's a bit expensive. But for my mom's computer that would be a nice solution.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| SMB | Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| VNC | Virtual Network Computing for remote desktop access |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 17 acronyms.
[Thread #132 for this comm, first seen 16th Oct 2026, 18:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Apache guacamole is really nice. Became a game changer for me.
Don't worry about vpn failures. I have used headscale for a long uninterrupted time. Yes, eventually you may need physical access. That event is as frequent as having a broken boot partition :p be careful to read changelogs when applying updates or have some other means to access of you will... Just saying that for me it has worked perfectly fine.