Remote Administration

[chasebadkids]

Hey everyone.

My grandmother recently started asking my family and myself to get her a laptop so that she can use the internet, email and stay in touch with us. I've gone ahead and put together some batch scripts, scheduled tasks and such in order to keep the system doing some routine cleaning on itself and keeping things up to date.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for software that I should install onto her system that would allow me to do remote administration with as little input from her as possible.

At this current time she's also in a strange living condition with strangers that we don't know, is there any ideas or methods anyone could recommend to keep tabs on where the system is? In case the laptop is stolen I was thinking of writing a batch script to get the IP address of the system and then having a scheduled task setup to automatically email out the log containing the ip address so that in case the systems stolen and its hooked up to the internet it could email out the IP and then I could use geo ip locator to see where it is.. give the IP to the authorities, yada yada... I understand that a format of the disks and I'm toasted, but I'm hoping that nothing of the sort happens anyways.


Any ideas and tips are appreciated!

Thanks

[Archangel-Amael]

An insurance policy for the laptop or as part of the normal home-owners policy.
Lo-Jack for laptops It is also a part of the bios chip
team-viewer or access my pc or similar. There are several variants.

[chasebadkids]

I was thinking about doing the lo-jack thing but I was trying to steer more towards no cost to low cost. Teamviewer seems like a good option, I've also come across Logmein.com Seems like a pretty good option. I suppose if I wanted a way to get to the command line of the system I could have it use netcat and connect up to my system but that might be a little much for this situation...

[venomousweb]

I was thinking of writing a batch script to get the IP address of the system and then having a scheduled task setup to automatically email out the log containing the ip address so that in case the systems stolen and its hooked up to the internet it could email out the IP and then I could use geo ip locator to see where it is.. give the IP to the authorities,

try opendns it comes with an app that will auto update the ip address when ever it is connected to the internet.

[Shavx]

I say setup an OpenSSH server on her computer and in her router forward port 22 traffic to her computer and do remote admin that way.

Maybe along the same lines you could setup VNC to do the same thing with port forewarding and knowing her address which would be simple enough for her

1) open browser
2) in address bar type What Is My IP Address? - IP Address Lookup, Internet Speed Test, IP Info, plus more